Amiens

Two rows of steep-roofed houses lean in toward a narrow canal, and everything in the picture funnels toward the middle distance, where the twin towers of Amiens Cathedral float in pale blue haze beside the domed belfry. The canal is one of the waterways of the Saint-Leu quarter, the old dyers' and millers' district of Amiens where the Somme splits into channels, a neighborhood locals have long nicknamed the little Venice of the north. Derain keeps the human scale modest: a woman in a dark coat pausing by the water, a figure bent over something on the far pavement, a scattering of brickwork and shutters painted with real attention to how a wall meets a roofline.

André Derain (1880-1954) made his name around 1905 as one of the young painters who shocked Paris with the screaming colors of Fauvism, working alongside Matisse. This is the other Derain, the one who emerged after the First World War and spent decades looking hard at old French and Italian painting, trading blazing reds for earth tones and structure. Critics have argued ever since about whether that shift was wisdom or retreat. Either way, the picture is honest about its subject: a working town with soot-stained brick, a cathedral it has lived beside for seven hundred years, and a gray northern sky that flattens all the colors into agreement.