Van Dongen was a French painter of Dutch origin. He trained at the Rotterdam Academy and started by publishing drawings in local newspapers on the theme of the port and its prostitutes, while pursuing his passionate love of colour in his first paintings. He left the Netherlands for Paris in 1897 and settled in Montmartre. At first he earned his living by selling caricatures and watercolours to magazines such as Assiette au beurre and Revue blanche. Meanwhile, his paintings were influenced briefly by divisionism and then, more profoundly, by the Nabis. Van Dongen soon emerged as one of the main representatives of Fauvism, a style of painting that made a bold first appearance at the Salon d’Automne in 1905. Van Dongen depicted the colourful, louche world of the Parisian cafés he frequented during those years, populated by prostitutes, dancers and ‘grisettes’, as well as scenes inspired by the Médrano Circus (1906–1907). Success followed very soon afterwards: a first solo exhibition at the Vollard gallery (1904), an invitation from the art dealer Kahneweiler to show his paintings in Düsseldorf, and a contract with Bernheim-Jeune (1909–1915). He had contacts with the German expressionist; he had a particular influence on Jawlensky, a member of the Blaue Reiter, and contributed drawings to an exhibition of Die Brücke in Dresden in 1908. He also discovered the colours of the South during trips to Spain and Morocco (1910–1911) and Egypt (1913). His affair with the Marchesa Casati from 1913, as well as his growing fame, gained him entry into the world of the aristocracy and high bourgeoisie. High society became his main subject from the end of the First World War to the stock market crash of 1929.
He portrayed the roaring twenties in his art: the races at Longchamp, the beach and casino at Deauville, brilliant Parisian soirées, and scores elegant, bejewelled women dressed in the latest fashions. In the 1930s Van Dongen turned his interest to landscape, while still continuing to work as a portraitist. He also produced illustrations for books, in particular a special 1925 edition of La Garçonne (1922), by Victor Margueritte, a seminal novel of the roaring twenties. He was also the author of La Hollande, les Femmes et l’Art (1927), La Vie de Rembrandt (1927) and Peindre, conseils pratiques (1937). His painted less and less from the 1950s. In 1959 he moved to a villa in Monaco, which he named Le Bateau-Lavoir, in memory of the famous building where he rented a studio, alongside Picasso, Modigliani and many others, during Montmartre’s artistic golden age.
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