The authenticity of this work has been confirmed by the Maurice De Vlaminck Committee.
Knoedler & Co., New York
Private collection, since 1956
Andros, Museum of Contemporary Art, Basil and Elise Goulandris Foundation, Glancing at the Century, 28 June - 20 September 1998, pp. 38-39, ill. p. 39
French painter born on 4 April 1876 in Paris, died 11 November 1958. This multidisciplinary artist never stopped producing until his death. He was not only a musician and writer but also a talented sportsman made famous by his cycling career, crowned by numerous successes. He began painting at the age of seventeen and married very young in 1894, to Suzanne Berly. The couple had two children, Madeleine and Solange. In 1900, he met Derain and they decided to work alongside each other, establishing themselves in the main room of a former hotel-restaurant on the Île de Châtou. The Van Gogh exhibition that he visited the following year at the Galerie Bernheim Jeune was a real revelation to him. Some time later, Vlaminck began, timidly at first, to exhibit his paintings, alongside those of Matisse and Derain, whose fauve style caused a shock at the Salon des Indépendants in 1905. The following year, the dealer Ambroise Vollard bought all the artist’s works and in 1907 organized Maurice Vlaminck’s first one-man exhibition. Vlaminck continued to exhibit at the Salon des Indépendants, up until the break caused by the First World War. This period of his work is marked by the influence of Cézanne. Then in 1919, the public discovered the new turn taken during the war by the painter’s work, whose style has become very personal, and was summed up by critics as “lyrical”. This was also the period when the artist began a new family with his new companion, Berthe Combes, with whom he would have two children. He held his first New York exhibition in 1922, which was followed by others in Brussels, London and Paris. The years that followed are marked by the publications of the artist’s writings, for instance Poliment in 1971, in which he evokes the memories of his childhood. Two Vlaminck retrospectives were held in 1933, one at the Galerie Bernheim Jeune and the other at the Palais des Beaux-Arts of Brussels. A friend of George Simenon, he was commissioned in 1938 to create the set design for the film adaptation of Simenon’ s book La Marie du port. He was elected a member of the Royal Academy of Belgium in 1955.
