André DERAIN - Children and the Musketeer, 1950 - Original lithograph

André Derain : (1880-1954) was a french painter, and one of the founders of Fauvism, of which he is considered to be the best representative. Ses oeuvres sont conservées dans les plus grands musées du monde. He painted figures, portraits, nudes, landscapes, marines, still lifes, and used several techniques: gouache, watercolors, pastels. He entered the Académie Camillo with Eugène Carrière and met Henri Matisse a the Louvre where he was making copies. In 1900, he met Maurice de Vlaminck on the train. He started painting his first landscapes. Il commence à peindre ses premiers paysages. He was a self-taught person, and he spent a lot of time in the museums, feeding his esthetic reflexion, with a great amound of readings (Zola, Nietzsche...). Vincent van Gogh, who he discovered in 1901, had a decisive influence on him, as well as the neo-impressionnists, and most of all Cézanne. He joined Matisse in Collioure in 1905, where they defined the style which made him famous: the fauvism. After 1906, he seemed to get influence from Paul Gauguin, as his colours started to be less vivid. But the next year he spent time at the Bateau-Lavoir, where he met Picasso and Matisse a with whom he traveled in Barcelona in 1910. In 1907, he tried stone sculpture, and moved to Montmartre to get closer to his friend Pablo Picasso. Starting from 1911, he comes back to a more traditional painting, using perspective and claroscuro. In 1919, he worked for ballet Diaghilev's ballet "La Boutique fantasque", which brought him to create numerous decors and costumes. His reputation grew more when he received the Carnegie Prize in 1928, and he started to exhibit worldwide: London, Berlin, Krankfurt, Düsseldorf, New York... After the war, he gave up public presentations of his works. In 1944, he declined the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts (ENSBA). He ended his life in a voluntary loneliness, and died on September the 8th, in 1958, following a car accident.