The high key, then the turn against modern art

The Chatou pictures came at the top of a very short arc. Vlaminck’s high-key, pure-colour landscapes belong almost entirely to the years 1905 to 1907, and the Chatou canvases are his signature output from that peak. There was a commercial reason he could paint so freely in 1906: the powerful dealer Ambroise Vollard had, around 1905 and 1906, reportedly bought out Vlaminck’s studio stock (the figures get quoted as several thousand francs, but treat the amount as reported, not carved), along with an option on future work. With his back catalogue sold in one stroke, Vlaminck could paint full-time, and the loudest Chatou canvases are partly the product of that freedom.

And then, almost as fast as it had arrived, the brightness drained out of his work. From around 1907 and 1908 Vlaminck’s palette darkened. He moved gradually toward the sober, structured influence of Paul Cézanne (the older painter had died in 1906, and a wave of attention to his work followed), and left behind the high-key Fauve colour that the Chatou pictures live in. This was an evolution, not a public recantation; the man who had wanted to burn down the academy with his vermilions simply put the vermilions away as his eye changed.

The real turn to hostility came later, and against a different target. In his later decades Vlaminck became openly hostile to modern painting, and to Cubism and Picassoin particular, blaming Picasso for dragging French art into a dead end. The wild beast of 1906 ended up one of modernism’s loudest scolds. The Chatou canvas, then, is a snapshot of a man at a moment he would not stay in, the brief year or two when he believed, completely, that colour straight from the tube was the whole future of painting.

The painting’s life as an object is the provenance, the documented chain of who owned a work from the artist’s hand to where it hangs now, and for this canvas the chain is short because the middle of it is not securely documented. What is certain is the end. The picture came to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York as part of the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection in 1998, accession number 1999.363.84.

There is a quiet symmetry in where it landed. The same museum holds van Gogh, the painter whose 1901 retrospective had set Vlaminck on fire in the first place, and whose late, expressive style the Met itself names as the engine behind this very canvas. The Chatou riverbank now hangs a few rooms from its own ancestor, in a city its painter never needed to see, still squeezed straight from the tube, still burning.