Charing Cross Bridge. London, 1905-06 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 Charing Cross Bridge. London 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.

A slash of molten yellow runs down the river like a dropped ribbon of light. It doesn’t politely reflect the sky; it declares itself, thickening as it comes towards us, broken into little lozenges of peach and hot pink.

Across the middle, Charing Cross Bridge. London sits low and steady, almost a simple bar, with a few red uprights punctuating it like exclamation marks. Behind, the city is reduced to a skyline of blue blocks and greenish towers, their edges softened as if the air has weight. That’s London, yes – but not the London of soot and documentary accuracy. André Derain turns the “customary gray” into a weather of colour: lilac drifting into rose, a high, sulphurous yellow flaring near the centre, and a cool patch of blue that reads like moving cloud.

Paint handling does much of the talking. Keep your eye on the water: Derain lays it in with quick, separate touches, some dragged sideways, others dabbed like scales. Near the right bank, those strokes start to curl in semicircles, a small, discovered whirl of brushwork that makes the river feel alive rather than simply pictured. Shadows, in the old sense, barely exist. Instead you get colour against colour – green set ticking beside violet, cobalt pressing up against apricot – and the whole surface seems to hum.

Knowing that André Derain had just spent the summer of 1905 painting in Collioure alongside Henri Matisse helps. You can feel the Fauvist decision: no more “snapshot of life,” as Derain later put it, but colour as a kind of risk, even an assault – “charges of dynamite.” And yet the subject stays ordinary, a commuter bridge and a working river. Perhaps that’s the point: modern London becomes a place where sensation trumps description.

One might imagine the sound here: a muffled rush of water, distant engines, air that smells faintly metallic. Seen at Museum of Modern Art, New York, the painting still feels fresh in its audacity. It doesn’t ask you to believe in its colours. It asks you to feel them.