Painting Movement

Fauvism

Fauvism was a short-lived French painting movement known for intense, non-naturalistic colors, simplified forms, and bold, expressive brushwork.

Fauvism quick facts

Fauvist painters made color central to their compositions, especially after their works drew attention at the 1905 Salon d'Automne in Paris.

Fauvism quick facts
Origin	France, especially Paris and the Mediterranean coast
Approximate period	1905–1908, with experiments beginning earlier
Classification	A loose French painters' group, not a formally organized school with a manifesto.
Historical context	The 1905 Salon d'Automne brought the painters' radical color into public view and helped establish the group's name.
Common subjects	Landscapes, coastal views, portraits, still lifes, and interiors
Defining characteristics	Vivid, non-naturalistic color, simplified forms, broad brushwork, and flattened space
Paint types	Oil paint in paintings and watercolor in studies.
Painting surfaces	Canvas for paintings and paper for watercolor studies.
Painting methods	Painters used strong color contrasts and conspicuous strokes, often applying vivid pigments directly from the tube.
Famous painters	Henri Matisse, André Derain, and Maurice de Vlaminck
Representative works	Matisse's Woman with a Hat (1905) and Derain's Charing Cross Bridge, London (1906)

Sources: National Gallery of Art: Fauvism, MoMA: Fauvism, and The Met: Fauvism, SFMOMA: Woman with a Hat, and The Met: Woman with an Umbrella at the Seashore.

Paint types in Fauvism

Fauvist painters used oil for vivid canvases, while Matisse made watercolor studies during his 1905 Collioure stay, testing color in a lighter medium.

Oil paint

Matisse's Woman with a Hat (1905) and Derain's Charing Cross Bridge, London (1906) are both oils on canvas, but their hues extend beyond naturalistic description. Matisse applied bright patches across the portrait, while Derain used vivid contrasts to remake London's riverfront view.
Watercolor paint

During summer 1905 at Collioure, Matisse made watercolors alongside his oil paintings. The Met identifies Woman with an Umbrella at the Seashore as watercolor over charcoal on paper; its compact, drawn format documents Fauve experimentation beyond the saturated canvases that dominate the movement's image.

Sources: SFMOMA: Woman with a Hat, National Gallery of Art: Derain's Charing Cross Bridge, and The Met: Matisse's 1905 watercolor.

Famous painters from Fauvism

Matisse, Derain, and Vlaminck led Fauvism, using strong color to transform landscapes, portraits, and familiar scenes into expressive compositions.

Henri Matisse

Matisse's early Fauvist paintings use broad, unmixed colors to heighten the effect of landscapes and portraits. In Woman with a Hat, the non-naturalistic patches of color describe the sitter while keeping the painted surface conspicuously flat, a break from restrained academic modeling.
André Derain

Derain's views of Collioure and London apply bright, contrasting colors in separate strokes that simplify buildings, water, and sky. These Fauvist landscapes make color carry structure and mood at once, establishing an approach that he later reconsidered as his painting moved toward more classical forms.
Maurice de Vlaminck

De Vlaminck's riverside landscapes use vigorous strokes and saturated complementary colors to make water, trees, and sky feel turbulent. His Fauvist method rejects subdued naturalism for direct visual intensity, especially in paintings of the Seine around Chatou.
Georges Braque

Before developing Cubism with Picasso, Braque painted Fauvist landscapes with vivid color and bold simplification. His early views of southern France show how a shared interest in expressive color could lead toward a different movement, where fractured form and multiple viewpoints replaced the Fauves' broad color fields.