A French painter, sculptor, printmaker and theatrical designer and co-founder of Fauvism, a movement noted for its intense use of colour.

While attending art classes, he met Henri Matisse and also Maurice de Vlaminck, with whom he shared a studio around 1900 and painted local scenes. After an interruption for military service, he and Matisse worked together through the summer of 1905 in the Mediterranean village of Collioure and later that year displayed their highly innovative paintings at the Salon d'Automne. The vivid, unnatural colours led the critic Louis Vauxcelles to derisively dub their works as les Fauves ('the wild beasts'), marking the start of the Fauvist movement. He then painted several series of landscapes (notably of London) before turning away from Fauvism in 1908 under the influence of Cubism and Cézanne after having moved to Montmartre. Between 1911 and 1914, he produced some works with archaic stylisation reminiscent of the Italian primitives and Byzantine art. After WWI he started to work in a more traditional or Neoclassical style related to that of Renoir and Corot. He was also active as a designer for the ballet and opera.