In 1900, he met and shared a studio with Maurice de Vlaminck and together they began to paint scenes in the neighbourhood, but this was interrupted by military service at Commercy from September 1901 to 1904.

The vivid, unnatural colors led the critic Louis Vauxcelles to derisively dub their works as les Fauves, or "the wild beasts", marking the start of the Fauvist movement.

[8] In March 1906, the noted art dealer Ambroise Vollard sent Derain to London to produce a series of paintings with the city as subject.

Fernande Olivier, Picasso's mistress at the time, described Derain[10] as: Slim, elegant, with a lively colour and enamelled black hair.

Always a pipe in his mouth, phlegmatic, mocking, cold, an arguer.At Montmartre, Derain began to shift from the brilliant Fauvist palette to more muted tones, showing the influence of Cubism and Paul Cézanne.

He displayed works at the Neue Künstlervereinigung in Munich in 1910,[13] in 1912 at the secessionist Der Blaue Reiter[14] and in 1913 at the seminal Armory Show in New York.

In 1914 he was mobilized for military service in World War I and until his release in 1919 he would have little time for painting, although in 1916 he provided a set of illustrations for André Breton's first book, Mont de Piete.

The 1920s marked the height of his success, as he was awarded the Carnegie Prize in 1928 for his Still-life with Dead Game and began to exhibit extensively abroad—in London, Berlin, Frankfurt, Düsseldorf, New York City and Cincinnati, Ohio.