The Symbolist painter Gustave Moreau was the movement's first inspirational teacher; as a professor at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, he pushed his students, including Henri Matisse and George Roualt, to think outside of the lines of formality and to follow their visions.  Matisse said of him, "He did not set us on the right roads, but off the roads. He disturbed our complacency." "With him one was able to discover the sort of work most suited to one's temperament."

 

In 1896, Matisse, then an unknown art student, visited the Australian Impressionist artist John Peter Russell on the island of Belle Île off Brittany.The next year he returned as Russell's student and abandoned his earth-coloured palette for bright Impressionist colours, later stating, "Russell was my teacher, and Russell explained colour theory to me". Russell had been a close friend of Vincent van Gogh and gave Matisse a Van Gogh drawing.

 

Post-Impressionists (Pointillists) such as Henri Edmond Cross and Paul Signac were more interested in creating harmonies of pure colour than in harmonising the colours of a particular landscape or natural scene. When Paul Signac published his Neo-Impressionist treatise in 1899, Matisse was immediately attracted to his ideas about colour and composition, and in 1904 the he spent time with Cross and Signac in St Tropez where Signac had a studio. Matisse and the other Fauves were excited by their approach to colour, however they lacked the scientific intent of Pointillism. Rather, they emphasised the expressive potential of colour, employing it arbitrarily.

 

Vlaminck's rough handling of paint, squeezing paint directly onto the canvas from the tube, was influenced by Vincent Van Gogh, whose work he'd seen in 1901. However, the Fauve artists (especially Matisse and Derain) tended to combine the vigour of Van Gogh's colour and brushwork with the tempering influence of other artists whose emphasis on structural values was more pronounced.

 

Space was also a defining characteristic of Fauvism, influenced by Post-Impressionists like Paul Cezanne. In 1899 Matisse purchased a Cezanne Bathers and spent the years of 1899 to 1901 evolving a method of translating his visual experience in a way that could accommodate the lessons of both Cezanne and Van Gogh.  Instead of trying to show space as three-dimensional, Matisse focused on flattening out the space, working in planes rather than depth, something that would later influence Pablo Picasso and his Cubist colleagues.   As well, Matisse admired Cézanne's  "merit of wanting the tones to be forces in a painting".

 

Matisse and Derain also studied the work of Paul Gauguin, and their works shared the latter's emphasis on broad areas of colour. His interest in "primitive" art and his stress on pure and non-naturalistic colour provided precedents for the Fauvists' interest in non-Western art and the expressive potential of hues. He was also attracted to Gauguin's sculptures.

 

At the turn of the Century, the admiration for primitive traditions extended to their aesthetic value, entirely apart from the context of their creation. Matisse, an inveterate museum browser, had probably encountered African sculptures at the Trocadéro museum with fellow Fauve painter Maurice de Vlaminck, before embarking on a spring 1906 trip to North Africa. After returning that summer, Matisse painted two versions of The Young Sailor  in which he replaced the first version's naturalistically contoured facial features with a more rigidly abstract visage reminiscent of a mask.

 

Fauvism was short lived, and by the end of the decade, artists in the group had diverged toward more individual interests. Nevertheless, Fauvism remains significant for it demonstrated modern art’s ability to evoke intense rhythm and mood through radical visual form.  The use of intense colour as a vehicle for describing light and space, as well as for communicating the artist's emotional state proved to be an important precursor to Cubism and Expressionism and an inspiration for future modes of abstraction. 

 

The work of Henri Matisse, in particular, whose own development as an artist is almost synonymous with the development of the Fauvism movement, was largely preoccupied with colour as a means of personal expression - colour in its pure and unmixed state composed in the artist's mind a form of pure expression. A sky could be orange, a tree crimson red, a face any combination of seemingly clashing colours, with the end result being a wholly independent abstraction of the artist's perception, rather than an abstraction of the physical form as was common in Impressionism.