Maurice de Vlaminck, Les Canotiers à Chatou, 1904–5. Estimate $1,500,000–2,500,000.
The present work depicts the Seine near Chatou, a small town located just northwest of Paris. Vlaminck, who moved to this region at the age of sixteen, was deeply attached to the local landscape which he strove to render in his paintings with the utmost intensity. It was at Chatou that one of the critical partnerships at the core of the Fauve movement began with the chance meeting of Vlaminck and André Derain in June 1900. When their outbound train derailed shortly after leaving Paris, the two artists "struck up a conversation while walking the rest of the way to Chatou, where they both lived. It turned out that they both painted, and...they agreed to meet the next day under the Pont de Chatou...with their canvases. So it was, as Vlaminck later said in his typically jocular manner, that the 'School of Chatou was created'" (John Klein, The Fauve Landscape (exhibition catalogue), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1990, p. 123).
