Maisons au Quai Vert, Bruges’ is one of several key paintings that the pioneering French abstract painter Auguste Herbin made during a visit to Belgium in 1906. In these early works Herbin pictures the medieval town of Bruges, with its cobbled streets and winding canals, in a flurry of colour. The radiant palette of this particular work, in a mosaic of crimson, emerald and cerulean, reveals the initial influence of Fauvism in Herbin’s career.

Following the infamous Fauve display at the Salon d’Automne in 1905, Herbin was amongst a group of young artists eager to adopt the saturated palette and rigorous brushstroke of the ‘wild beasts’ Matisse, Derain and Vlaminck. Herbin was so immersed in the Fauve style that he exhibited with the group at the Salon des Indépendants in the same year that the present painting was made. ‘Maisons au Quai Vert, Bruges’ is a defining example from this brief, but vital period in Herbin’s early oeuvre.

The rich palette of this work also crucially foreshadows Herbin’s mature abstract style and interest in the symbolic and allegorical power of colour. Inspired by Kandinsky’s theory that tone could have the same emotional effect as a score of music, Herbin argued that colour has its own distinct resonance away from subject. In ‘Maisons au Quai Vert, Bruges’ Herbin begins to express this concept through the vibrant tones of deep red and blue that mark the canvas. Herbin formulated this idea of separating colour and form through a new ‘plastic alphabet’ and his pivotal treatise ‘L'Art Non-Figuratif Non-Objectif’ (1949).

This rare example from Herbin’s Fauve period was first handled by the prominent Leicester Galleries in London before entering a private collection.