Whitford Fine Art

André Derain was a seminal French painter known for his landscapes, portraits, and still lifes. Alongside Henri Matisse, Derain pioneered the use of pure color relationships to produce vibrant Fauvist works such as London Bridge (1906). “Fauvism was our ordeal by fire—colors became charges of dynamite,” he once explained. “The great merit of this method was to free the picture from all imitative and conventional contact.” Born on June 10, 1880 in Chatou, France, Derain began painting at an early age, meeting Matisse in the class of the Symbolist painter Eugène Carrière. Derain and Matisse spent the summer of 1905 together, painting around the Mediterranean village of...