Vlaminck and Derain on the riverbank

Vlaminck did not paint Chatou alone, and the second name in this story is André Derain (1880–1954; pronounced “duh-RANN”). The two met, by the standard account, in 1900, after a train accident: their train derailed near Chatou, and the two young men got to talking. They became close, and for a stretch around 1900 and 1901 they shared a studio at Chatou, painting the same river you have just been looking at. Derain was the younger of the two and would soon become a central Fauve in his own right, but for a few years he and Vlaminck were a two-man operation on this exact riverbank.

That pairing has a nickname. The two of them are remembered together as the “School of Chatou” (in French, l’École de Chatou), which is an art-historian’s tidy label for what was really just two friends with two easels. It was never a formal school with members and a doctrine; it was a nickname for a two-man precursor to Fauvism, the pair of them painting the Seine’s riverbanks in bold, anti-naturalistic colour before the movement had a name. Several years before the wild beasts were christened, the School of Chatou was already doing the thing.

The name came at a show. In the autumn of 1905, both Vlaminck and Derain exhibited at the Salon d’Automne, an annual Paris exhibition, in a room full of painters working in this same hot, unnatural colour, Matisse and Derain among them. A critic named Louis Vauxcelles (pronounced “voh-SELL”), looking at the room, called these bright-colour painters “fauves,” French for “wild beasts.” It was an insult, and it stuck the way good insults do. The painters never chose the name, never signed a manifesto under it, and never quite shook it. Fauvismtakes its name from that one critic’s jab in that one room, and Vlaminck, with his tube colour and his burning trees, was about as wild a beast as the room contained.

So the Chatou canvas of 1906 sits one year on from the naming, painted by one of the two men of the School of Chatou, at the very peak of the brief movement that the room of 1905 had accidentally christened. It is, in a real sense, a Fauve painting made on the home ground where this kind of bold, anti-naturalistic colour had been worked out early, years before anyone thought to call it anything.