Printer: Mourlot

Dimensions: 77 x 52 cm

Condition: Very good 

Available: Available in an oak frame £600 + P&P.

Artist: Kees Van Dongen (1877 - 1968)

Van Dongen was a Dutch-French painter and one of the leading figures of the fauvist movement. Born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, he studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in his home town. He moved to Paris in 1899 and exhibited in the Salon d’Automne in 1905 alongside Matisse (who loathed him), Derain and de Vlaminck. With his radical use of form, colour and subject, which focused on the red-light district, he became known at that time as ‘the painter of brothels’. Vlaminck said of him that he was the ultimate ‘historian of all the cynical libertinage… of prostitutes, of hysterical worldlings, of unsatisfied strangers, disoriented exotics.’

After the First World War, his bright fauvist palette and loose, painterly style was popular with French society and he was in hot demand for portraits. He toyed with ladies’ charms and claimed his success was down to ‘elongate the women and especially to make them slim.’ Adding, ‘after that it just remains to enlarge their jewels. They are ravished.’

During the Second World War, his paintings were fashionable with the Nazis and as a consequence he was marginalised for a time by wider society. But collectors and connoisseurs continued to admire his work. Many of his paintings remain popular exhibits in many worldwide permanent collections including the MoMA in New York, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the National Gallery in Washington, DC.