A fishing port and a younger painter

In the summer of 1905, Henri Matisse (1869–1954), thirty-five years old and not yet famous, took his family south to a small town called Collioure(pronounced “koll-YOOR”). It sits on France’s Mediterranean coast, down near the Spanish border in the old region of Roussillon, where the Pyrenees come down to meet the sea. And it was a working fishing town, not a postcard: in 1905 Collioure was a major anchovy-and-sardine port, with a fleet of more than a hundred boats and the salting sheds the catch went into ranged through the streets, all under a light that is harder and brighter than anything in Paris. Matisse rented an apartment overlooking the harbor. The picture we’re going to look at is, quite literally, the view out of one of its windows, and the boats in it are that fishing fleet.

Matisse did not go down there to be alone. In early July he was joined by a younger painter, André Derain(1880–1954; pronounced “deh-RANN”), then twenty-four. The two of them spent the summer painting side by side, out in the hard southern light, pushing each other further than either would have gone alone. They are the reason Collioure gets called, in nearly every art-history book that mentions it, “the birthplace of Fauvism.” Treat that phrase gently. Fauvism was not born on a particular Tuesday in a particular doorway. It was a way of painting that came together over a summer, in two men working in the same town on the same problem, and Collioure is the place where it happened. It is a where, not a when.

So hold the setting. A small anchovy port. A rented room over the water. The Mediterranean sun. A friend painting in the next street. And a window, thrown open onto the harbor, that Matisse decided to paint exactly as it stood, except in colors that no harbor on Earth has ever actually worn.