At the débuts of all the revolutionary styles of painting that now seem merely to make up the lovely late-nineteenth-century phenomenon of modern French art, from Monet’s Impressionism, in the eighteen-seventies, to Seurat’s neo-Impressionism and Gauguin’s and van Gogh’s Expressionism, most Paris art critics performed an invaluable service: they were nearly always wrong in their judgments, and thus sustained the conviction of each emerging contingent of artists, usually upheld by little else (being poor, visionary, and worried), that their imaginations, palettes, and paintings were set on one more right, immortal track. Fauvism, at its birth, was distinguished by the insults that customarily greeted the arrival of something vital and unfamiliar; it was termed a monster, and Paris critics called it aberrant, repellent, sensational, and unnecessary. Derain’s painting of vermilion sailboats was considered “fit for a child’s bedroom;” the bedroom would have to be a rich child’s now, for this painting de l’époque would fetch around six thousand dollars in the market. Rouault’s barkers and fat ladies in a Montmartre street fair (he was then far from his crucifixions and Christ heads, now to be seen in museums) earned him the gibe of “caricaturist, misogynist.” Matisse, for his “Woman with Hat,” a portrait of his wife, was termed “robustly gifted but gone astray in eccentric color.” At the Salon, someone tried to stab the portrait.

Encouraged by the opprobrious critiques and dazzled by Matisse’s dominating Salon performance, other young artists were converted to Fauvism, including Raoul Dufy and Georges Braque. Dufy, already a colorist, was at first so affected by Matisse’s new approach to composition that he temporarily gave up his bright colors—and Matisse’s, too. Braque, essentially a serious temperament, painted a dozen Fauvist landscapes with trees the color and shape of oranges. Derain had already made even London’s Westminster Bridge and Hyde Park look lurid. He and Vlaminck had been experimenting with pure color before they met their future chief and became the leading junior Wild Beasts. The pair of them—they had become acquainted during a slight accident on a commuter train outside Paris in 1899—had set up their pre-Fauve practice in a riverside shack near the suburb of Chaton, painting cabbage fields and the Seine, because they cost nothing as models. Vlaminck, who had been a professional bicycle racer, a violinist, a leader of a bogus gypsy orchestra, and a novelist but never, before the railway accident, a serious painter, came to seem, because of his energy and precocity, a conspicuous and flashing figure among the Fauves. In a tentative gesture, the two young men and Matisse, not long after they met—drawn together by their common interest in roaringly pure colors—sent canvases in their new style of painting, like brilliant samples, to the 1905 spring Salon des Indépendants. Each of them sold one picture for a hundred francs (then twenty dollars) to a Le Havre art patron known to dislike modern art. The explanation was that he had decided to buy what seemed to him the ugliest pictures in the show for his son-in-law, whom he also disliked.]