André Derain

Henri Matisse

1905

© ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2023

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On loan

Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, USA): Matisse and Derain

Artist: André Derain 1880–1954
Medium: Oil paint on canvas
Dimensions: Support: 460 × 349 mm
frame: 710 × 595 × 112 mm
Collection: Tate
Acquisition: Purchased 1958
Reference: T00165

Display caption

This work was made during a holiday at the fishing port of Collioure in the south of France in 1905, when Matisse and Derain painted portraits of each other. Under Matisse’s influence, Derain had begun to use strong, non-naturalistic colours, applied in small separate brushstrokes, to convey the sensations of light and shade. Their radical use of colour led critics described them and their associates as ‘Fauves’ or wild beasts, and ‘Fauvism’ became an important parallel to the rise of Expressionism in Germany.

Gallery label, February 2009

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Catalogue entry

André Derain 1880-1954

T00165 Henri Matisse 1905

Inscribed 'a derain' b.r.
Oil on canvas, 18 1/8 x 13 3/4 (46 x 35) approximately; the painted area is not a perfect rectangle
Purchased from Mme Henri Matisse (Grant-in-Aid) 1958
Prov: Henri Matisse, Paris; Mme Henri Matisse, Paris
Exh: Les Sources du XXe Siècle, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris, November 1960-January 1961 (126); Derain, RA, London, September-November 1967 (119, repr.); Modern Masters: Manet to Matisse, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, April-May 1975 (28, repr. in colour); National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, May-June 1975 (28, repr. in colour); Museum of Modern Art, New York, August-September 1975 (28, repr. in colour); The 'Wild Beasts': Fauvism and its Affinities, Museum of Modern Art, New York, March-May 1976 (works not numbered, repr. in black and white, and in colour); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, June-August 1976 (works not numbered, repr. in black and white, and in colour); Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, September-October 1976 (works not numbered, repr. in black and white, and in colour)
Lit: Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Matisse: his Art and his Public (New York 1951), pp.54-5; Jean Leymarie, Le Fauvisme (Geneva 1959), p.74, repr. p.79 in colour
Repr: Studio, CLIX, 1960, p.110 in colour; Trewin Copplestone, Modern Art Movements (London 1967), pl.5 in colour

A portrait of the painter Henri Matisse (1869-1954), executed at Collioure in the summer of 1905 at the same period as the portrait of Derain by Matisse acquired in 1954 (N06241). During this visit Derain also painted a small picture of Matisse seated barefooted at a table on the beach, which is now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Matisse first met Derain in 1900, and in the autumn of 1904, when Derain had just returned from his military service, helped to persuade his parents not to make him give up his career as a painter. In the spring of 1905 Derain joined the Matisses when they went south to Collioure: it was there that the two artists painted their first pure and characteristic Fauve pictures.

This picture may have been the one exhibited at the Salon d'Automne in October-November 1905 (436) as 'Portrait'.

Published in:
Ronald Alley, Catalogue of the Tate Gallery's Collection of Modern Art other than Works by British Artists, Tate Gallery and Sotheby Parke-Bernet, London 1981, pp.166-7, reproduced p.166