Fishing Boats, Collioure

In the summer of 1905 André Derain, then twenty-five, left Paris for a two-month sojourn with his friend Henri Matisse. They settled in the small fishing town of Collioure, on the southwest coast of France near the Spanish border. The painters had first met in Eugène Carrière's Paris studio in 1899, and it was with Matisse's help that Derain had received his parents' permission to pursue a career in art. During the summer in Collioure the two men discussed art theory and painted canvases filled with bright light, high color, and exuberant, often broken brushwork. Along with Maurice de Vlaminck, they were the major proponents of a short-lived movement known as Fauvism. (The term "Fauves"—"Wild Beasts"—was attached to these artists when their innovative work shocked and offended the sensibilities of viewers at the 1905 Salon d'Automne exhibition in Paris.)