Following his move to Paris in 1897, van Dongen began to experiment with an increasingly modern palette in order to capture the atmospheric outlooks and vibrant characters of the city. Painted in 1904, Montmartre (matin) depicts the iconic Sacré-Cœur Basilica and its environs enveloped in the bright glow of the morning light. In this palette of creams, pinks, blues and mauves, the present work is evidence of his mastery of the Impressionist technique that marks a shift from the darker northern tones which characterised his earlier output, whilst anticipating his move into Fauvism the following year.

In this waking landscape, van Dongen employs intermingling textured brushstrokes of pure pigment, fully utilising this limited palette to capture the ephemeral light of the morning, a chromatic nuance that allows van Dongen to break down the pictorial representation of the city to a mood of near abstraction. In both style and subject, Montmartre (matin) can be compared to Claude Monet’s London series which were exhibited at Durand-Ruel in the June of 1904. Much like Monet’s depictions of the Houses of Parliament (see fig. 1), van Dongen uses the Sacré-Cœur Basilica as an emblem of the Parisian landscape. Here, its domed roof and steeple rise above Montmartre to structure the composition amid the artist's expressive colour exploration of the city’s atmosphere at dawn. As the art critic Carl Sharten observed at the t.mes : “it was the great master Monet who had the deepest influence” on van Dongen, indeed he “shows more impact from Monet than any other Dutch master” (quoted in Anita Hopmans (Ed.), The Van Dongen Nobody Knows: Early and Fauvist Drawings 1895-1912, Exh. Cat., Rotterdam, Lyons and Paris, 1997, p. 61).