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  • Raoul Dufy
    Jun 3, 1877 - Mar 23, 1953
  • The Ancient Theatre of Taormina - Raoul Dufy was a French artist and designer whose paintings and prints portrayed leisure activities and urban landscapes. His distinctive style is characterized by bright colours thinly spread over a white ground, with objects sketchily delineated by sensuously undulating lines. Dufy took as his subjects scenes of recreation and spectacle, including horse races, regattas, parades, and concerts.
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The Ancient Theatre of Taormina
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  • The Ancient Theatre of Taormina

  • Raoul Dufy
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  • 20 X 24 in
  • $95.95
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  • $155.95
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  • 1923
    Oil on canvas
    32 x 39 1/2 in. (81.4 x 100.5 cm.)

    What Dufy painted no other artist could have rendered, because no other possessed his gift for receiving and reflecting sensations of pleasure, light, and joy… His fine talent as a painter, his masterly use of smooth, brilliant, shining paint, so light and transparent, shows how perfectly his technique suited his artistic feeling’.

    Painted in 1923, during the artist’s journey to Sicily, the present work depicts the Greek theatre in Taormina. Inspired by the Mediterranean landscape, attracted by the ancient and modern buildings bathed in light, Dufy brought new life to the ruins of the Greek theatre at Taormina where he was to meet up with Pierre Courthion.

    Executed with dynamic and cheerful brushstrokes, Le théatre antique de Taormina glorifies the beauty and nobility of Sicily. The surface of the mountains and texture of the clouds are animated within the vital breadth of mark-making inherent in the artist's masterful technique with the influence of Fauvism readily seen in both the intensity of colour and in the loose application of the paint.

    For Dufy, Sicily’s main attraction was the light. ‘In Taormina […] the air, touched by a fiery light, throbbed between the columns of the Greek theatre, above the overhanging rocks, from which the eye plunges into the sea spread out below…[Dufy] had taken up his position on the terraces, in the ruins of the Greek theatre, painting its columns.

    Why settle for a paper print when you can add sophistication to your rooms with a high quality 100% hand-painted oil painting on canvas at wholesale price? Order this beautiful oil painting today! that's a great way to impress friends, neighbors and clients alike.

  • 100% hand-painted oil painting on artist grade canvas. No printing or digital imaging techniques are used.
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Other paintings by Raoul Dufy:

Terrace of a Cafe
Terrace of a Cafe
The Alley
The Alley
The Artist and His Model in the Studio at Le Havre
The Artist and His Model in the Studio at Le Havre
The Avenue du Bois
The Avenue du Bois
Raoul DufyRaoul Dufy was a French artist and designer whose paintings and prints portrayed leisure activities and urban landscapes. He created airy washes of light and shade, into which he would draw bold calligraphic brushstrokes. The artist's experimental use of color was influenced both by Claude Monet and his Fauvist peer Henri Matisse. “Blue is the only color which maintains its own character in all its tones it will always stay blue,” the artist mused. “Whereas yellow is blackened in its shades, and fades away when lightened; red when darkened becomes brown, and diluted with white is no longer red, but another color—pink.” Born June 3, 1877 in Le Havre, France, he enrolled in night classes at the École des Beaux-Arts before studying under Léon Bonnat at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts on a scholarship. Dufy first encountered Fauvism at the Salon des Indépendants in 1905, after which he adapted the style to serve his own artistic purposes. During his life, the artist traveled both abroad and within France, painting views of the Mediterranean city of Nice, as well as scenes of horse races and regattas. Throughout the 1920s, Dufy worked in a variety of materials, producing ceramics, tapestry hangings, and large-scale architectural decorations. His commission for the 26th Venice Biennale won him the International Grand Prix for painting in 1952, a year before his death on March 23, 1953 in Forcalquier, France. Today, the artist’s works are held in the collections of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Art Institute of Chicago.