Woman in an Armchair

While studying to be an engineer, André Derain attended a series of painting classes that would change the course of his life. He met Henri Matisse, who convinced Derain’s parents to let the young man abandon his engineering career and devote himself solely to painting, after his stint in the military. The two artists spent the first few years of the new century in each others company, and together they founded Fauvism, characterised by a wildness of form and vivid colors. Derain became one of the most celebrated and influential artists of the avant-garde, yet by the end of the decade, he had tired of the new and retreated into study of the Old Masters. His paintings became austere in their palettes and traditional in their compositions, and after military service in the first World War, Derain’s days of wildness were long behind him. The young rebel of the art world became the leader of a classicist revival and celebrated the world over for restrained paintings in the noble European traditions; assured, beautiful but deeply rooted into the past in an act of rejection of the very modernity he had helped begin.