Andre Derain painted 30 landscapes of London during two brief visits in 1906 and 1907. Inspired by Claude Monet’s paintings of the River Thames just below the Houses of Parliament, Derain’s works in fact changed the face of landscape painting, and caused a generation of artists to rethink their use of color. “By saturating his London views in colours so fierce it hurts to look at them, Derain was entering into unknown aesthetic territory – territory in which colour had become independent of the form it was used to construct, a pictorial element in the picture subject only to the painter’s expressive intentions.”