The Fauves painted directly from nature, as the Impressionists (Impressionism) had before them, but Fauvist works were invested with a strong expressive reaction to the subjects portrayed. First formally exhibited in Paris in 1905, Fauvist paintings shocked visitors to the annual Salon d'Automne; one of these visitors was the critic Louis Vauxcelles, who, because of the violence of their works, dubbed the painters fauves (“wild beasts”).

The leader of the group was Henri Matisse (Matisse, Henri), who had arrived at the Fauve style after experimenting with the various Post-Impressionist (Post-Impressionism) approaches of Paul Gauguin (Gauguin, Paul), Vincent van Gogh (Gogh, Vincent van), and Georges Seurat. Matisse's studies led him to reject traditional renderings of three-dimensional space and to seek instead a new picture space defined by movement of colour. He exhibited his famous Woman with the Hat (1905) at the 1905 exhibition. In this painting, brisk strokes of colour—blues, greens, and reds—form an energetic, expressive view of the woman. The crude paint application, which left areas of raw canvas exposed, was appalling to viewers at the time.

The other major Fauvists were André Derain (Derain, André), who had attended school with Matisse in 1898–99, and Maurice de Vlaminck (Vlaminck, Maurice de), who was Derain's friend. They shared Matisse's interest in the expressive function of colour in painting, and they first exhibited together in 1905. Derain's Fauvist paintings translate every tone of a landscape into pure colour, which he applied with short, forceful brushstrokes. The agitated swirls of intense colour in Vlaminck's works are indebted to the expressive power of van Gogh.

Three young painters from Le Havre, France, were also influenced by Matisse's bold and vibrant work. Othon Friesz found the emotional connotations of the bright Fauve colours a relief from the mediocre Impressionism he had practiced; Raoul Dufy (Dufy, Raoul) developed a carefree ornamental version of the bold style; and Georges Braque (Braque, Georges) created a definite sense of rhythm and structure out of small spots of colour, foreshadowing his development of Cubism. Albert Marquet, Matisse's fellow student at the École des Beaux-Arts in the 1890s, also participated in Fauvism, as did the Dutchman Kees van Dongen (Dongen, Kees van), who applied the style to depictions of fashionable Parisian society. Other painters associated with the Fauves were Georges Rouault, Henri Manguin, Charles Camoin, and Jean Puy.

For most of these artists, Fauvism was a transitional, learning stage. By 1908 a revived interest in Paul Cézanne (Cézanne, Paul)'s vision of the order and structure of nature had led many of them to reject the turbulent emotionalism of Fauvism in favour of the logic of Cubism. Matisse alone pursued the course he had pioneered, achieving a sophisticated balance between his own emotions and the world he painted.