The Fauves: Wild Beasts of Early Modern Painting

In October 1905, a French art critic called Louis Vauxcelles walked into Room VII of the Salon d'Automne at the Grand Palais in Paris. The room was hung with paintings by Henri Matisse, André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck, Albert Marquet, Henri Manguin, Othon Friesz, and a handful of other young painters in their twenties and thirties. The colours on the walls were unmixed and saturated past anything the Salon had previously hung. Reds were red. Greens were green. Faces were lit with patches of pure chrome yellow and emerald. In the centre of the room stood a small bronze figure of a child in the style of Donatello.

Vauxcelles, looking at the bronze, said to the painter Charles Camoin: Donatello chez les fauves — Donatello among the wild beasts. The phrase appeared in his review in Gil Blas the next day. The painters in Room VII had been called many things by other critics that autumn — incoherent, intoxicated, possibly insane — but Vauxcelles's line was the one that stuck. By the end of 1905 they were les Fauves. Two years later the movement was over. Almost every painter in it went somewhere else. But the colour decisions made in that one room in the autumn of 1905 changed the next eighty years of European painting, and most of the painters who left academy training in the decade after — Picasso, Braque, the German Expressionists, the early Soviet avant-garde — walked through the door the Fauves opened.

Henri Matisse, Woman with a Hat (1905). Oil on canvas, 80.6 × 59.7 cm. The painting Leo and Gertrude Stein bought for 500 francs from the Salon d'Automne that autumn — a portrait of Madame Matisse painted in colours that match no actual hat or face anywhere.

What the Fauves actually did

The argument behind Fauvism is short and was understood at the time. By 1905 the Impressionist generation — Monet, Renoir, Pissarro — had already broken the academy's grey-brown palette and put pure colour on the canvas. The Post-Impressionists who followed them — Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne — had pushed the colour further. Van Gogh's saturated chrome yellows and ultramarines, Gauguin's flat red and orange patches in Tahiti, Cézanne's broken green and rose architectures — all three had been arguing through the 1880s and 1890s that colour did not have to describe what was in front of the painter. Colour could carry its own argument about the painting.

What the Fauves did in 1905 was take the argument to its limit. They removed the last conventions tying colour to observation. A face could be painted in green if the green made the painting work. A roadway could be cadmium red. The sea could be vermilion. The sky could be lemon yellow. The decision rested on the composition's internal logic — what colour was needed where the painter was — not on what was actually in front of the easel. The shorthand the Fauves themselves used was that colour had become expressive rather than descriptive. The painter Maurice Denis, looking at the Salon d'Automne room, called Fauvism the painting of the painter himself rather than the painting of the world.

Vincent van Gogh, Cypresses (1889). The deepest precursor to Fauvism — Van Gogh's saturated chrome yellows, viridian greens, and ultramarine blues had already proven by the 1890s that colour did not need to describe what was in front of the painter.

Henri Matisse — the leader by accident

Matisse was thirty-five in 1905, ten years older than most of the painters who followed him into the wild-beast room. He had trained classically under Gustave Moreau and had been painting in dark academic colour into his thirtieth year. The shift had come slowly between 1898 and 1905 — copies after Cézanne, summers at Collioure on the Mediterranean coast painting alongside Derain, increasing willingness to leave white canvas showing between strokes of pure colour. The painting that became the central image of Fauvism, Woman with a Hat (1905), was a portrait of his wife Amélie. The colours on her face are blue, green, yellow, and rose, applied as patches. The hat is a structure of pure pigment. The painting was bought from the Salon d'Automne for five hundred francs by the American collectors Leo and Gertrude Stein. It hung in the Stein apartment on the rue de Fleurus where every younger painter in Paris saw it for the next forty years.

André Derain — the second voice

Derain, twenty-five in 1905, had served his military conscription and returned to painting full-time in 1904. He painted alongside Matisse at Collioure that summer and the work he showed at the Salon d'Automne — landscapes of the Mediterranean port in red, orange, green, and chrome yellow — was the most saturated Fauvism produced. The following year, on commission from the dealer Ambroise Vollard, Derain went to London and painted thirty canvases of the Thames, Westminster, and Charing Cross Bridge in colours Monet had never used on the same motif. The Thames water in Derain is pink and green. The bridges are vermilion. The sky is orange against blue. The paintings are not naturalistic and were never meant to be. They are the application of the Fauve method to a famous London subject.

André Derain, Charing Cross Bridge (1906). Painted on commission from the Paris dealer Ambroise Vollard, who sent Derain to London expressly to repaint Monet's Thames subjects in the new Fauve palette.

Maurice de Vlaminck — the wildest beast

Vlaminck was twenty-nine in 1905 and the only Fauve who had never trained in a studio. He had been a professional bicycle racer, a violinist, a sometime mechanic, and a writer of novels before he settled on painting in his twenties. He met Derain in 1900 on a train when both men were heading home to the suburb of Chatou. They shared a studio there until 1905. Vlaminck's colour was the loudest in the Salon d'Automne — pure cadmium reds, viridian, prussian blue, applied straight from the tube. He claimed in interviews that he had never copied a painting, never been to a museum, and would not paint a scene he had not personally walked through. The claim was partly performance. The painter Vlaminck became after 1908, when he turned away from saturation and toward darker tonal painting, retained almost none of the Fauve palette. The painter Vlaminck was in 1905 and 1906 stayed legible only in the paintings.

Albert Marquet — the quiet Fauve

Marquet, thirty in 1905, was Matisse's closest friend from the École des Beaux-Arts and the painter inside Fauvism whose colour ran the coolest. His Fauve canvases from 1905-1907 use the saturated palette but stay close to actual observed colour relations — a port at evening painted in the actual colours of evening, intensified slightly, with the brushwork held tight. The result is a Fauvism with the volume turned down. Marquet would spend the rest of his career painting harbours, rivers, and bridges in the same restrained register; his later work, from 1910 onward, drifted back toward the tonal grey-green of late Corot. Inside the original Fauve room he was the painter showing that the method did not require maximum saturation to produce a new picture.

Albert Marquet, Fécamp — The Beach at Sainte-Adresse (1906). Oil on canvas, 64.5 × 80 cm. The Fauvism with the volume held down — saturated colour deployed in close relation to observation, the brushwork tight, the composition tonal.

Henri Manguin — Fauvism for the figure

Manguin, thirty-one in 1905, came out of the same Gustave Moreau studio as Matisse and Marquet. His Fauve period from 1905 to 1908 produced a series of paintings of his wife Jeanne, his children, and the rocks of the Mediterranean coast at Cavalière in saturated colour. The figures stay anchored — Manguin's drawing did not loosen the way Matisse's did during these years — but the colour relationships are full Fauve. The paintings sit between Renoir's late figure work and Matisse's early Fauve domestic interiors. Manguin's reputation never matched Matisse's because he refused to develop past Fauvism the way the other leaders did; the Mediterranean figure paintings of 1905-1908 are essentially the work of his entire career.

Henri Manguin, Jeanne au rocher — Cavalière (1906). Oil on canvas, 50 × 61 cm. Fauve colour anchored to figure drawing; Manguin's bridge between late Renoir and early Matisse domestic painting.

Othon Friesz — Fauvism from Le Havre

Friesz, twenty-six in 1905, came to Paris from the Norman port of Le Havre and spent his early career painting the harbours of Antwerp, Honfleur, and the Mediterranean coast around La Ciotat. His Fauve canvases from 1906 to 1908 — Antwerp port scenes, the cargo cranes at Honfleur in saturated pink and chrome yellow, the Mediterranean fishing boats at La Ciotat in vermilion — are among the most architecturally composed in the movement. Friesz had absorbed Cézanne's faceted structural drawing more deeply than Matisse or Derain, and his Fauvism stays organised around a Cézanne armature underneath the colour. After 1908 he turned toward darker tonal painting like Vlaminck and Derain. The Le Havre and Honfleur canvases of his Fauve years are the work he is remembered for.

Raoul Dufy — the Riviera Fauve

Dufy was twenty-eight in 1905 and came, like Friesz, from Le Havre. He saw Matisse's Woman with a Hat at the Salon d'Automne and committed to Fauvism on the spot, abandoning the Impressionist style he had been working in. His Fauve canvases of 1906 to 1909 — the regatta at Sainte-Adresse, the old houses on the harbour at Honfleur, the carnival at Sainte-Adresse — were painted in a palette closer to Derain's London Thames pictures than to Matisse's domestic interiors. Dufy's later career took him in another direction — the decorative seascapes and racetrack pictures of the 1920s and 1930s for which he is most widely known — but the work of 1906-1909 is full-strength Fauvism with a Le Havre coastal subject.

Raoul Dufy, Old Houses on the Basin at Honfleur (1906). Oil on canvas. The Le Havre coastal Fauvism — saturated harbour facades in chrome yellow, vermilion, and viridian, painted in the year Dufy converted to the movement after seeing the Salon d'Automne.

Kees van Dongen — the portrait Fauve

Van Dongen, twenty-eight in 1905, was the Dutch outsider of the group. He had moved to Paris from Rotterdam in 1897 and lived in the Bateau-Lavoir, the same Montmartre tenement where Picasso would arrive in 1904. His Fauve canvases concentrated on figure painting rather than landscape — dancers, café-concert performers, prostitutes, society portraits. The palette in his Fauve work is closer to Matisse's than to Vlaminck's, but the subjects are urban and the brushwork looser. After 1910 Van Dongen settled into society portraiture and stayed there for fifty years; the high-saturation Fauve canvases of 1905-1908, including the brothel and circus pictures shown alongside Picasso's early work in the Bateau-Lavoir, are his Fauve contribution.

Why Fauvism mattered after Fauvism ended

By 1908 most of the painters in Room VII had moved on. Derain was painting darker, more Cézanne-influenced landscapes. Vlaminck had abandoned saturation almost entirely. Friesz and Manguin had turned toward more tonal compositions. Only Matisse continued the Fauve programme past 1908, and even Matisse's painting from 1909 onward sits inside Fauvism rather than extending it. The movement that had a name for two years and a critical reception for one season was over as a coherent project before the painters in it turned forty.

What stayed was the decision. The principle that colour on a canvas did not have to describe colour in the world — that the painter could choose the colour the composition required, regardless of observation — was no longer arguable after 1907. Every younger painter who saw the Salon d'Automne room or the Stein collection on the rue de Fleurus took the decision as settled. Picasso, who was in Paris through the Fauve years, painted the saturated Self-Portrait with a Palette in 1906 in colours he could not have used in 1903. The German Expressionists who founded Die Brücke in Dresden in 1905 worked through Fauve reproductions during their first three years. The Russian avant-garde of Larionov and Goncharova, the early Mondrian, the Dutch De Stijl, all worked through the door Fauvism had opened.

Paul Gauguin, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1897-98). The flat saturated colour patches of Gauguin's Tahitian period — alongside Van Gogh — are the immediate Post-Impressionist source the Fauves extended in 1905.

The two-year movement was the bridge between Post-Impressionism and the first generation of fully modern painting. It was the last collective project in French painting that the academy could plausibly try to dismiss. After Fauvism, the argument was over.

Key takeaways

• Fauvism was named in October 1905 by the critic Louis Vauxcelles, who called Room VII at the Salon d'Automne a cage of "wild beasts" (fauves) after seeing the saturated colour paintings of Matisse, Derain, Vlaminck, Marquet, Manguin, and Friesz hung around a small Donatello-style bronze.

• The argument the Fauves made was short: colour does not have to describe what is in front of the painter. A face can be painted in green, a sea in vermilion, a sky in chrome yellow, if the composition's internal logic requires those choices. The decision rests on the painting, not on observation.

• The movement was two years long (1905-1907) and was over as a coherent project by 1908. Most of the painters in the original Salon d'Automne room moved on — Vlaminck and Derain toward darker tonal painting, Friesz toward Cézanne-armatured composition, Marquet back to a tonal Corot register. Matisse alone extended the Fauve programme into his later career.

• The immediate sources were Van Gogh (saturated chrome and ultramarine palette), Gauguin (flat patches of pure colour), and Cézanne (structural composition that supported saturated colour without collapsing the picture). The Fauves' contribution was to push all three precedents to the limit at once.

• Eight painters carried the Fauve project at full strength: Matisse, Derain, Vlaminck, Marquet, Manguin, Friesz, Dufy, and Van Dongen. Each took the principle in a different direction — Matisse toward domestic interior, Derain toward saturated landscape, Vlaminck toward primary-colour expressionism, Marquet toward restrained tonal Fauvism, Manguin toward figure painting, Friesz toward port architecture, Dufy toward coastal regattas, Van Dongen toward urban figure.

• After Fauvism the principle that colour could be independent of observation was no longer contestable in serious European painting. Picasso, Braque, the German Expressionists, the Russian avant-garde, and Mondrian all built on the door Fauvism opened. The two-year movement is the bridge between Post-Impressionism and the first generation of fully modern painting.

Browse Fauve and Post-Impressionist prints — Matisse, Derain, Van Gogh, Gauguin — in the archive at zocineartdesign.etsy.com.