Maurice de Vlaminck

David Findlay Galleries, New York
Private Collection, Washington, D.C. (acquired from the above in the 1950s)
Private Collection, Atlanta (acquired from the above and sold: Sotheby's, New York, November 8, 2006, lot 295)
Acquired at the above sale

The canvas is not lined. There are intermittent scattered, thin lines of retouching to the center of the right edge, to the center of the bottom right quadrant and to the center of the left edge, all visible under ultra-violet light. Apart from a nailhead-sized paint loss to the extreme bottom left corner and some overall paint shrinkage, this work is in good condition.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
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Maurice de Vlaminck lived and worked for the majority of his life in the towns south-east of Paris. By 1900 he began walking along the banks of the Seine, painting the suburban towns of Chatou, Croissy, La Grenouillère and Bougival. The views of these towns are the genesis of the Fauve landscape in which he collaborated with his friend and fellow painter, André Derain. Although he traveled throughout France to paint with the other Fauvists, Vlaminck always returned to the towns around the environs of Paris that had been earlier painted by Monet and Renoir.

By 1907 Vlaminck modified his bold Fauvist palette, and he described the transition as follows: "To work by pressing the tube directly onto a canvas soon leads to excessive cleverness; in the end you transpose mathematically... emerald green becomes black, pink a flamboyant red, etc. Suddenly numbers stand out and success is deadened. The play of pure colors.... the extreme orchestration into which I threw myself unrestrainedly, no longer satisfied me. I could not stand not being able to hit harder, to have reached maximum intensity, to be limited by the blue or red of a paint dealer" (Marcil Giry, Fauvism, Origins and Development, New York, 1982, p. 219).

After Vlaminck began to spend more time in Paris in 1907, other styles and movements began to influence his work. The important Cézanne retrospective at the Salon d'Automne in 1907 proved to have the strongest impact as Vlaminck was clearly overwhelmed by the intensity of Cézanne's brushwork and attention to light (see fig. 1).

Painted circa 1912, the present work is an excellent example from this transitional period. The strong colors of Cézanne's palette, as well as Cézanne's diagonal hatching can be appreciated in the delineation of the foreground as well as in the trees in the middle ground. Vlaminck's preoccupation with "structuring" is evident in the present work. Instead of focusing on using the bright colors reminiscent of his Fauve period, Paysage avec maisons is a hallmark landscape of the artist's innovative post-Fauve period.