Fauvism burst onto the Paris art scene at the Salon d'Automne of 1905, when works by Henri Matisse, André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck and others shocked visitors with their non-naturalistic, explosively saturated colour. A critic called the room containing them a cage of 'fauves' (wild beasts) — the artists kept the name. Fauvism was not a formal theory but a shared practice: colour freed entirely from descriptive function, used instead for its direct emotional effect. Matisse's Woman with a Hat (1905) shows his wife's face painted green, orange and red — not because those were the colours of her complexion but because they expressed something true about the experience of seeing her. Fauvism was brief as a group movement but permanent in its influence: it established that colour could be non-representational while remaining intensely meaningful.