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拍品专文
Maithe Valles-Bled and Godliève de Vlaminck will include this painting in the forthcoming Vlaminck catalogue raisonné being prepared under the sponsorship of the Wildenstein Institute.
With the growth of industry and the spread of railway transportation in the latter part of the 19th Century few areas along the Seine west of Paris retained their pristine state. When Monet painted in Argenteuil in the 1870s he largely avoided the factories and warehouses that had sprung up there, although the Neo-Impressionists who followed him during the next decade viewed these developments as an inescapable and even interesting aspect of modernity.
The industrial revolution, however, had largely bypassed Chatou, a small town on the Seine outside of Paris. In the 1880s and 1890s it had been a playground for tourists from the capital who enjoyed sailing and canoeing along the wooded banks of the small island in the river facing the town. Hotels and restaurants catering to the visitors did a lively trade. The Restaurant Fournaise, a meeting place for the Impressionists, was still in business at the turn of the century. The only other industry in Chatou was the hand laundry housed in barges along the riverbanks. The most modern structure in the town was its railway bridge, which had been built in the 1840s, and it seemed no less picturesque than its surroundings. The attractions of the area were well-documented in photographic postcards, the distribution and sale of which had become a flourishing business.
Both Vlaminck and Derain grew up in Chatou, although they did not meet and learn that each other was interested in painting until June 1900, when, as Vlaminck tells it, they walked home together after their commuter train from Paris derailed. They began to paint together, constituting a "School of Chatou." Much of the attractiveness of their Chatou landscapes stems from their familiarity with the vicinity. By the time they began to work the wave of tourism subsided, so that the artists could keep such distractions at a distance, especially once summer had come and gone. "I am living in the midst of the countryside," Vlaminck wrote. "What grandeur does solitude express! What sincerity it compels! Thanks to it, one understands, or rather one feels more deeply the true values, the kernel of life, inner peace...How much closer to humanity I feel in contact with a peasant, or a highway vagrant, than beside any representative of the privileged class!" (quoted in S. Whitfield, Fauvism, London 1991, p. 115).
This simple sincerity is also seen in Vlaminck's manner of working. He was never trained as a painter and regarded himself as a primitive. He rarely drew or made studies, and preferred to paint directly from nature. Matisse and other Fauve painters arrived at their radical style through the theories and discipline of Signac's Neo-Impressionism. Vlaminck emulated only one other artist, van Gogh, whose paintings he first saw in an exhibition at Bernheim-Jeune in 1901. "In him I found some of my own aspirations ," Vlaminck recalled, "and as well as a revolutionary fervor an almost religious feeling for the interpretation of nature" (quoted in J. Freeman, The Fauve Landscape, exh. cat. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1990, p. 2l).
The present painting depicts the Seine around Chatou. The reddish highlights in the foreground mark the old towpath that was once used for hauling barges along the riverbank. A lavoir, or laundry boat, is moored to the bank in the center of the composition; white smoke billows upward from its furnace stacks. The wooded Ile de Chatou appears in the distance. Vlaminck's use of heavy impasto, as well as the emphatic directionality of his brushstrokes, stem directly from his admiration for the paintings of van Gogh. In 1906, around the time this painting was done, Derain had left Chatou to work in a studio in Paris, and to be closer to the activity in the galleries and Salons. Vlaminck remained behind, despising the artificiality of life in the city. "I had no wish for a change of scene, " he wrote. "All these places that I knew so well, the Seine with its strings of barges, the tugs with their plumes of smoke, the taverns in the suburbs, the color of the atmosphere, the sky with its great clouds and patches of sun, these were what I wanted to paint" (quoted in ibid., p. 148).
With the growth of industry and the spread of railway transportation in the latter part of the 19th Century few areas along the Seine west of Paris retained their pristine state. When Monet painted in Argenteuil in the 1870s he largely avoided the factories and warehouses that had sprung up there, although the Neo-Impressionists who followed him during the next decade viewed these developments as an inescapable and even interesting aspect of modernity.
The industrial revolution, however, had largely bypassed Chatou, a small town on the Seine outside of Paris. In the 1880s and 1890s it had been a playground for tourists from the capital who enjoyed sailing and canoeing along the wooded banks of the small island in the river facing the town. Hotels and restaurants catering to the visitors did a lively trade. The Restaurant Fournaise, a meeting place for the Impressionists, was still in business at the turn of the century. The only other industry in Chatou was the hand laundry housed in barges along the riverbanks. The most modern structure in the town was its railway bridge, which had been built in the 1840s, and it seemed no less picturesque than its surroundings. The attractions of the area were well-documented in photographic postcards, the distribution and sale of which had become a flourishing business.
Both Vlaminck and Derain grew up in Chatou, although they did not meet and learn that each other was interested in painting until June 1900, when, as Vlaminck tells it, they walked home together after their commuter train from Paris derailed. They began to paint together, constituting a "School of Chatou." Much of the attractiveness of their Chatou landscapes stems from their familiarity with the vicinity. By the time they began to work the wave of tourism subsided, so that the artists could keep such distractions at a distance, especially once summer had come and gone. "I am living in the midst of the countryside," Vlaminck wrote. "What grandeur does solitude express! What sincerity it compels! Thanks to it, one understands, or rather one feels more deeply the true values, the kernel of life, inner peace...How much closer to humanity I feel in contact with a peasant, or a highway vagrant, than beside any representative of the privileged class!" (quoted in S. Whitfield, Fauvism, London 1991, p. 115).
This simple sincerity is also seen in Vlaminck's manner of working. He was never trained as a painter and regarded himself as a primitive. He rarely drew or made studies, and preferred to paint directly from nature. Matisse and other Fauve painters arrived at their radical style through the theories and discipline of Signac's Neo-Impressionism. Vlaminck emulated only one other artist, van Gogh, whose paintings he first saw in an exhibition at Bernheim-Jeune in 1901. "In him I found some of my own aspirations ," Vlaminck recalled, "and as well as a revolutionary fervor an almost religious feeling for the interpretation of nature" (quoted in J. Freeman, The Fauve Landscape, exh. cat. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1990, p. 2l).
The present painting depicts the Seine around Chatou. The reddish highlights in the foreground mark the old towpath that was once used for hauling barges along the riverbank. A lavoir, or laundry boat, is moored to the bank in the center of the composition; white smoke billows upward from its furnace stacks. The wooded Ile de Chatou appears in the distance. Vlaminck's use of heavy impasto, as well as the emphatic directionality of his brushstrokes, stem directly from his admiration for the paintings of van Gogh. In 1906, around the time this painting was done, Derain had left Chatou to work in a studio in Paris, and to be closer to the activity in the galleries and Salons. Vlaminck remained behind, despising the artificiality of life in the city. "I had no wish for a change of scene, " he wrote. "All these places that I knew so well, the Seine with its strings of barges, the tugs with their plumes of smoke, the taverns in the suburbs, the color of the atmosphere, the sky with its great clouds and patches of sun, these were what I wanted to paint" (quoted in ibid., p. 148).