A river town just outside Paris

Chatou (pronounced “sha-TOO”) is a small town on the Seine, the river that runs through Paris, about nine miles (roughly fourteen kilometers) west of the city center. It was, in 1906, the kind of place a Parisian went on a Sunday to get out of the city: a riverside town with boats and a bend of green water and an island in the middle of the river, the Île de Chatou, where you could rent a skiff, eat lunch by the water, and pretend for an afternoon that you did not live in a city of three million people. This was leisure infrastructure, more or less, for the working and middle classes of Paris, fifteen minutes out on the train.

Painters had been here before. A generation earlier, in the 1870s and early 1880s, this exact stretch of the Seine had been the Impressionists’ outdoor studio. Pierre-Auguste Renoir painted his great river-party picture, the Luncheon of the Boating Party, at the Maison Fournaise, a boating restaurant on the Île de Chatou, with the same bridge and the same water in the background. So when our painter set up his easel on this riverbank in 1906, he was not discovering virgin ground. He was painting a postcard view that other, gentler painters had already made famous. The whole point of what he did to it is that he did not paint it gently.

The painter is Maurice de Vlaminck (1876–1958; pronounced “vla-MANK”), and he was not visiting. He lived in the area, and he spent the summer of 1906 painting in and around Chatou, the river and its traffic over and over. The same handful of things turn up across his canvases of these two years: the Seine itself, the tugboats hauling barges up and down a working commercial river, the sailboats, and the white riverbank houses with trees rising behind them. He painted this view so many times that the museums now hold several near-identical canvases with near-identical names, which is a problem for cataloguers and a sign of how hard he was hammering one motif. The one we are looking at, the version that hangs in New York, shows a tugboat and sailboats on the water, white houses on the bank, and a stand of trees, all of it rendered in colours that the river never actually wore.

The place itself: a quiet, pretty, well-worn leisure spot, the sort of view a hundred Sunday painters had set down in tasteful greens and silvery blues. That is the room Vlaminck walked into.