Description

This view from London Bridge depicts bustling shipping on the Thames and shows Tower Bridge in the distance. Derain painted four other works showing the same part of the river. He had been sent to London by his dealer, Vollard. The idea was to update, in Fauve style, the popular Thames views painted by Claude Monet a few years earlier. Strongly-coloured and freely-handled, this painting is characteristic of Fauvism in creating vivid effects through bold contrasts of colour.

In few artists has the battle between the mind and the senses been clearer. At certain points in London, Derain would approach reality with a cool intellectuality, reducing the scene before him to a series of dots and dashes, shunning drawing, sticking to the primary colors. The result is a kind of scaled-up paint-by-numbers Pointillism. Yet Derain is a far more appealing and complex artist when he settles for less and proceeds more intuitively.
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