Color straight from the tube

To understand the paint you have to understand the man holding the tube, because Vlaminck made a point of being unlike every other serious painter in France. He was self-taught, and proud of it to the point of belligerence. He took a few drawing lessons and studied briefly with a local painter as a young man, but he refused formal academic training and built a whole identity out of being the untaught outsider, the man who never went to the schools. Before he painted for a living he had two earlier lives: he was a professional racing cyclist (a career ended by a bout of typhoid in his early twenties), and he was a violinist and music teacher who played in bands for money. He came to painting as a big, physical, self-made man with no patience for the academy, and it shows in every stroke.

It is worth being honest that this was partly a performance. Of all the Fauves, Vlaminck leaned hardest into the wild-man label, and he cultivated the untaught-rebel image as deliberately as he lived it. A 2024–25 retrospective at the Museum Barberini in Potsdam even took the title Maurice de Vlaminck: Modern Art Rebel, the persona made into a show. And he modeled that persona, knowingly, on van Gogh, the unschooled outsider whose own legend, the genius nobody recognised, he had fallen for in 1901. Vlaminck did not just admire van Gogh’s painting; he borrowed van Gogh’s myth and wore it.

He is famous for a line about the academy. By his own telling, Vlaminck wanted to burn down the École des Beaux-Arts, the official state art school in Paris, the gatekeeper of respectable French painting, and burn it down specifically with his colours, with his cobalts and his vermilions. It is the sort of thing he said, and it has been quoted of him for a century, though the exact words drift from book to book and no clean original source pins them down, so take it as the boast it was rather than a verbatim manifesto. The feeling behind it, though, is real and is right there on the Chatou canvas: a man who thought the way to attack good taste was to out-colour it.

The thing that turned that temperament into a method was a show. In 1901, a large early retrospective of Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890), the Dutch painter who had died unknown and unsold a decade earlier, opened at the Bernheim-Jeune gallery in Paris, around seventy of his canvases hung together. Vlaminck saw it, and it knocked him sideways. Van Gogh painted with undisguised, expressive brushwork and colour pushed past the truth for the sake of feeling, and that was exactly the permission Vlaminck had been looking for. He is widely reported to have said, of that day, that he loved van Gogh better than his own father, a line that gets repeated everywhere without a clean original behind it, so read it as the kind of thing he said rather than a sourced quotation. The point it carries is solid: van Gogh, more than any living teacher, is the painter standing behind the Chatou canvas. The Met says as much of this exact picture, that Vlaminck emulated the undisguised brushwork and the intuitive application of paint of van Gogh’s late, expressive style, which he so admired.

That same room did something else, too. It was here that André Derain, the friend Vlaminck already painted alongside at Chatou, introduced him to Henri Matisse. So the show that lit Vlaminck up also, in passing, assembled the three painters, Matisse, Derain, and Vlaminck, who would be the core of Fauvism four years later. The movement’s social origin and its deepest influence are the same afternoon.

So here is the method, and it is gloriously simple. Vlaminck did not labour over delicate mixtures on a palette to find the exact right grey-green of a real riverbank. He took the colour straight from the tube and put it on the canvas. The Met’s own catalogue says of this painting that he applied the colours directly from the tube in daubs and swirls of pigment, combining the primaries of blue and red with white, and using those frank, unmixed hues for the white houses, the green leaves, the reddish-orange tree trunks, and the small boat in the distance. That is the whole technical engine of the picture. No careful local colour (the true, observed colour of a thing under ordinary light), no atmospheric softening, no greying-down to suggest distance and air. Squeeze, daub, swirl. The pigment goes on at nearly the strength it had in the tube, and the brush leaves its ridges where it passed.

It is worth saying plainly what that buys him. Working straight from the tube is fast, and it keeps every colour at its maximum voltage instead of letting it settle into the muted truth of a real landscape. A painter trained at the École would have called it crude, and that was, more or less, the idea. Vlaminck was not trying to record the Seine at Chatou. He was trying to hit you with it.