André Derain

In the summer of 1905, André Derain and Henri Matisse set up easels side by side in the small Mediterranean port of Collioure and spent months painting with color straight from the tube, red seas, orange trees, blue shadows on faces, with little attempt at describing the real thing. When the results went on show at the Salon d'Automne that autumn, the critic Louis Vauxcelles walked into a room hung with their canvases around a conventional bronze statue and called it Donatello among the wild beasts. The name les fauves stuck to the movement Derain had just co-founded.

Fauvism itself lasted barely three years. By 1910, Derain had turned toward the discipline of Cézanne and the Italian old masters, and after the First World War he became a leading voice of the so-called return to order, painting in a deliberately classical, subdued style that had little left of Collioure's color.

That later reputation for restraint made his choices in the 1940s more damaging than they might otherwise have been. In 1941, Derain accepted an invitation from Nazi Germany to travel to Berlin along with other French artists, a trip the occupying authorities used for propaganda at home. He was never formally tried after the war, but the association shadowed the rest of his career. He died in September 1954, at 74, after being struck by a car near Paris.