La rivière à Montreuil-sur-Mer

André Derain, often remembered for his wild, chromatic contributions to the Fauvist movement in the first decade of the twentieth century, also created more naturalistic visions of the French countryside. La rivière à Montreuil-sur-Mer, for example, captures the artist's impressions of a picturesque northern French town. This composition is a deceptively simple and richly pigmented one. Derain flattened the humble village landscape to a densely knitted quilt of emerald and turquoise. The green foliage is punctuated by a few red roofs and bare patches of earth, represented by strokes of ochre, terracotta and clay-colored paint. The artist observed the rural village from the opposite bank of the Canche River, quickly recording the reflection of buildings and foliage on the surface of the water in the immediate foreground. This destabilizing visual effect was borrowed from the Impressionist masters of landscape, including Claude Monet.
La rivière à Montreuil-sur-Mer also exemplifies Derain's admiration of the Post-Impressionist painter, Paul Cezanne. Derain sought to emulate his bold, blocky, proto-Cubist landscapes after the latter artist's death in 1906. The present work embodies Derain's close study of Cezanne's constructive brushstrokes and flattened compositions, but also the younger artist's stated desire to find “in nature something different—something which is fixed, eternal, and complex” (quoted in P. Dagen, ed., André Derain: Lettres à Vlaminck, Paris, 1994, p. 175).