Paysage aux environs de Chatou

A blaze of orange and red fields rolls across this 1906 landscape by André Derain, one of the founders of a movement called Fauvism. Critics coined that name from "les fauves," or "the wild beasts," after being stunned by how these painters splashed bright, untamed colors across their canvases. The reasoning is easy to spot here. Pink and blue mingle in the sky, warm tones flood the ground, and a cluster of little houses with red roofs nestles into the glowing scenery. Copying nature was never the goal for Derain. He chased the mood of a place and the sheer pleasure of color itself.

The view captures the countryside around Chatou, a town just outside Paris on the banks of the Seine. This area mattered deeply to Derain because he shared a studio there with his friend Maurice de Vlaminck, and the two egged each other on toward wilder experiments. Their bond with the place ran so deep that people started calling them the "School of Chatou." Quick dabs and loose strokes fill the canvas, giving everything a restless, buzzing kind of life. Rather than a faithful record of the land, the painting reads like a burst of joy at seeing the world in a brand new way.