Paysage à l'Estaque (Estaque Landscape)

André Derain and Henri Matisse helped create France’s first 20th-century avant-garde movement with the exuberantly coloured landscapes they made in the summer of 1905 in the Mediterranean town of Collioure. Although discredited as Fauves (‘wild beasts’) by one conservative critic when they had their debut at the Salon d’Automne of 1905, Matisse, Derain and the artists with whom they exhibited happily embraced the epithet.

In 1906, Derain embarked on a solo painting trip to the French Riviera town of L'Estaque, where he painted this and 14 other landscapes. Energised by area’s ‘blonde, golden light that suppresses all shadows,’ he painted the sun-drenched earth, tree trunks and hilly land mass in the background with rhythmic strokes of smouldering, unnaturalistic colours, which he sometimes applied directly from the tube onto the primed canvas.

− 2024

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