This work will be included in the ‘Archives Vlaminck’ founded by Madame Godeliève de Vlaminck, in collaboration with Madame Pascale Krausz.

In Promeneuse au bord de la rivière, Vlaminck has mastered the post-Fauve stage of his artistic trajectory. Even before the major Cézanne retrospective at the Salon d’Automne on 1907, which was to have such a profound impact on Vlaminck, his fellow fauves Henri Matisse and André Derain had turned to Cézanne, and for the next decade Vlaminck explored Cézanne’s fusion of post-Renaissance convention, perspectival subversion and liberating brushwork. This moment in Vlaminck’s work is a fascinating one, when he travels alongside a master of order while retaining the spontaneous painterly freedom he’d acquired as a Fauve.

Slowly reducing his palette to a cool range of earthen tones, Vlaminck initially replaced his once bold, bright Fauve colours with softer blues and greens but after 1912 we see him reintroduce some of his bold personal style. Promeneuse au bord de la rivière is a glorious example of this late transitional period. The present work embodies the characteristic energetic and lively brushwork and the brightly charged moments: the fiery orange roofs of the riverside houses, the vigorous brushstrokes of blue-green shadow on the towpath, the dark verticals of the leaning trees, the sudden red roofs of the riverside cottages, and the lively thick impasto of the clouds reflected on the river. These vertical and horizontal strokes brimming with energy give the water paradoxically a shimmering but reflective surface - qualities of exuberance which were at the very heart of the Fauve genre.


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