Maurice de Vlaminck (1876 – 1958) was a French painter. Along with André Derain and Henri Matisse he is considered one of the principal figures in the Fauve movement, a group of modern artists who from 1904 to 1908 were united in their use of intense color. Vlaminck was one of the Fauves at the controversial Salon d’Automne exhibition of 1905.

He began painting in his late teens. The turning point in his life was a chance meeting on the train to Paris towards the end of his stint in the army. Vlaminck, then 23 and already active in anarchist circles in Paris, met an aspiring artist, André Derain, with whom he struck up a lifelong friendship. When Vlaminck completed his army service in 1900, the two rented a studio together, the Maison Levanneur, which now houses the Cneai, for a year before Derain left to do his own military service.

Vlaminck participated in the controversial 1905 Salon d’Automne exhibition. After viewing the boldly colored canvases of Vlaminck, Henri Matisse, André Derain, Albert Marquet, Kees van Dongen, Charles Camoin, and Jean Puy, the art critic Louis Vauxcelles disparaged the painters as “fauves” (wild beasts), thus giving their movement the name by which it became known, Fauvism.

In 1911, Vlaminck traveled to London and painted by the Thames. In 1913, he painted again with Derain in Marseille and Martigues. From 1925 he traveled throughout France, but continued to paint primarily along the Seine, near Paris. Resentful that Fauvism had been overtaken by Cubism as an art movement Vlaminck blamed Picasso “for dragging French painting into a wretched dead end and state of confusion”.