Today is the last day of the British Dental Association’s National Smile Week. So this week’s picture (for reasons that will be made apparent below) is Andre Derain’s Portrait of Bartolomeo Savona. Painted in 1906, it is one of relatively few modern pictures to be found in the superb collection of the Barber Institute of Fine Arts in Birmingham.
Derain’s portrait, with its bright, not entirely naturalistic colour scheme and its forthright handling, is a bold example of the style that he pioneered together with Henri Matisse in the early years of the twentieth century – and which led certain Parisian critics to dub the two artists “Les Fauves”, or “the wild beasts”. Like many such labels, it is a little misleading. When Derain was in his early twenties he became preoccupied by the desire to go beyond the powerful example of the Impressionists and to find new ways of painting nature. Nearly all Derain’s pictures of the period are landscapes and cityscapes composed with vivid touches of bright and broken colour. His few portraits depict friends and intimates and his decision to number Savona among them can be explained by a chance meeting that took place when the artist was on a trip to London in the spring of 1906.
Derain had been encouraged to go there by his dealer, Ambroise Vollard, who commissioned the artist to paint some views of London and the Thames in the hope that they might cause as much of a stir in Paris (and sell as well) as Claude Monet’s London pictures of 1899-1901. Derain was visually excited by the English capital, although as he confided to Matisse he found its inhabitants intimidatingly silent and frigid, with a manner that was “gloomy, hypocritical and mocking”. English women,...
