Bridge over the Riou, 1906 Andre Derain (1880-1954)

We create our paintings with museum quality and covering the highest academic standards. Once we get your order, it will be entirely hand-painted with oil on canvas. All the materials we use are the highest level, being totally artist graded painting materials and linen canvas.

We will add 1.6" (4 cm) additional blank canvas all over the painting for stretching.

High quality and detailing in every inch are time consuming. The reproduction of Andre Derain also needs time to dry in order to be completely ready for shipping, as this is crucial to not be damaged during transportation.
Based on the size, level of detail and complexity we need 8-9 weeks to complete the process.

In case the delivery date needs to be extended in time, or we are overloaded with requests, there will be an email sent to you sharing the new timelines of production and delivery.

TOPofART wants to remind you to keep patient, in order to get you the highest quality, being our mission to fulfill your expectations.

We not stretch and frame our oil paintings due to several reasons:
Painting reproduction is a high quality expensive product, which we cannot risk to damage by sending it being stretched.
Also, there are postal restrictions, regarding the size of the shipment.
Additionally, due to the dimensions of the stretched canvas, the shipment price may exceed the price of the product itself.

You can stretch and frame your painting in your local frame-shop.

Once the painting Bridge over the Riou is ready and dry, it will be shipped to your delivery address. The canvas will be rolled-up in a secure postal tube.

We offer free shipping as well as paid express transportation services.

After adding your artwork to the shopping cart, you will be able to check the delivery price using the Estimate Shipping and Tax tool.

The paintings we create are only of museum quality. Our academy graduated artists will never allow a compromise in the quality and detail of the ordered painting. TOPofART do not work, and will never allow ourselves to work with low quality studios from the Far East. We are based in Europe, and quality is our highest priority.

Indian red turns a tree trunk into a declaration. Against it, exotic blues and lavender outlines snap the landscape into place, as if André Derain is not so much recording a view as composing a durable sign for it.

Bridge over the Riou names a real spot in the south of France, yet it doesn’t behave like a brisk outdoor note. You can feel the slow thinking in the complex patterning: forms adjusted, nudged, rebalanced. From the foreground bank to the stony riverbed and then up to the higher ground beyond, depth barely gets a chance – everything is pressed forward, flattened into a single busy plane. Still, the place remains readable. Look down to the lower right for the bridge; find the little cabin tucked into the ravine; notice the covered well shaped like a beehive. Beyond the river, houses sit back behind the trees, half concealed, like a private afterthought.

Walk through the color and it is like stepping into hot air. This is Fauvism after its 1905 succès de scandale, when Derain and his peers scandalized Paris with their unruly chroma, yet still kept one Impressionist faith: painting should follow nature and catch the passing moment of contemporary life. By 1906, Derain’s ambition shifts. He wants pictures that, as he put it, would “belong to all time” while still belonging to his own moment. You see that change in the handling. Those separate, flickering strokes from 1905 are absorbed into larger, steadier blocks of paint. Some are edged in blue or lavender; elsewhere an indian red or pink flashes where you might expect bark to behave itself.

A close pleasure: along the central foliage, the brush lays down small, tiled touches of orange and citron that read almost like scales, then suddenly resolves into a broad green mass. One might imagine the sound of cicadas in that thick, heated stillness.

If Matisse is a useful cousin here, it’s because Derain shares his nerve for color while pushing harder on structure. The light feels southern and intense, yes, but these hues belong less to nature than to art – and that is exactly why, in the Museum of Modern Art New York MOMMA, the scene keeps its charge long after the day that inspired it has passed.