Maurice de Vlaminck French (1876-1958) The Angelus color wood engraving, Signed in the print. Strong impression and colors. 1960 edition published in Paris (Les Heures Claires; Raymond Jacquet). Descriptive note on the back of the matting. Biography from the Archives of askART: Maurice Vlaminck and Andre Derain were good friends and neighbors in France; they made a spectacular pair. Both were huge and both wore conspicuous clothes. One of Vlaminck's favorite items of costume was a painted wooden necktie. They lived and worked in a seaside suburb called Chatou and invited Matisse to visit them there. Thus began one of the most fruitful associations in modern French art: Fauvism. Despite their friendship there were wide differences in their personalities as well as many similarities. Vlaminck claimed to despise intellectual pursuits; Derain read enormous numbers of books. Vlaminck called Derain "a hot-house plant"; Derain's father forbade his son to bring Vlaminck to their house. Vlaminck was about twenty-five at the time; he was already married and had two children. He took life a great deal more lightly than the others; he had no money. He was a red-headed colossus, well known as a boxer and a wrestler. He supported himself and his family partly as a violinist, sometimes posing as a gypsy, and by writing pulp novels that skirted the boundaries of pornography. He was a blatant self-promoter who painted in furious bursts, often spreading the oil paint on directly from the tubes. By the age of thirty, he had attained heights he never regained in a long lifetime of painting. After a brief skirmish with Cubism, Vlaminck began striking out against the current trend. He retired to Normandy and started painting the dozens of landscapes, golden wheat fields and chilly, wind-swept winter scenes that earned him the title "poet of stormy skies". Submitted August 2004 by Jean Ershler Schatz, artist and researcher from Laguna Woods, California. Sources include: The World of Matisse by John Russell, Time-Life Library of Art Time Magazine, May 24, 1968 13"H x 17"W (sight), 19 1/2"H x 27 1/2"W (mat)