Maurice de Vlaminck art work Tugboats on the Seine

Vlaminck is well known as the most unruly painter of the fauvism, an impression that reflects both on his personality and his work. Maurice de Vlaminck is a self-taught artist, who claims that painting should be the unmediated expression of an artist's temperament,"emotive, ferocious, tender, as natural as life itself." During the pre war period having been an anarchist sympathizer, he would link the strident colorism and bold brushwork of his work later to social and political dissent.

In 1905-1906 he was a very bright intuitive student of Van Gogh and Gauguin, whose works had been the subject of various important exhibitions in Paris at that time. It was a Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in 1901 at Van Gogh exhibition where Vlaminck himself credited his preoccupation with color, although his work did not fully develop the association of Van Gogh's style.

It was until 1905 after Vlaminck had been exposed to the new paintings that Matisse and Derain had brought back from their trip to the south of France. Vlaminck's work exploded with pure color and broad strokes of paint, under the impact of their progress.

Derain and Vlaminck both lived in Chatou, a suburb of Paris in the Seine valley. It was here that they began painting together there as well as in other towns along the river, at which time they rented a studio on the Ile-de-Chatou in 1900. It was in and around Chatou the two artists had grown up, which was a fairly quiet, picturesque spot that had been spared the kind of industrial activity that had recently influenced the character of other nearby towns such as Argenteui.

Vlaminck and Derain painted many of the same sites during the fauve years, including views of and from the pont de Chatou, which is an an old railroad bridge. Vlaminck likes to stay more in the suburban landscape than Paris and his images of Chatou were personal acclamation to familiar ground.

Tugboats on the Seine is one of Vlaminck's most proficient fauve manner. His art of work is done with broad, loose but loaded, densely concentrated brushstrokes. As for the surface of the picture, it teems with a calligraphic energy that represent fauve painting, and is a special hallmark of Vlaminck's manner. This effect is elevated by the absence of shadows; the use of pure colors all over the composition allowing all areas of the image to occupy the picture plane with equal weight.

It can be closely compared to other 1905 and 1906 paintings such as The Seine at Chatou which shows both a tugboat and sailboats. Vlaminck carries the shade of the tugboats, which were painted with white, blue, and red bands into the water.

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