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• The Beach and Pier at Trouville

• Raoul Dufy

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• La plage et l’estacade de Trouville, 1905
  Oil on canvas
  25 1/2 x 31 7/8 in. (64.8 x 80.9 cm.)
  Private Collection.
  
  ‘Having arrived at some beach subject or other I would sit down and start looking at my tubes of paint and my brushes. How, using these things, could I succeed in conveying not what I see, but that which is, that which exists for me, my reality?’
  (Raoul Dufy)
  
  Emerging during a time of important transition in Raoul Dufy’s career, La plage et L’estacade de Trouville is one of the first canvases in which the artist began to explore a new, vibrant and free colouristic vocabulary inspired by the ground-breaking art of the fauvist movement. Dufy had first come across the Fauves in the spring of 1905 at the Salon des Indépendants, where his encounter with Henri Matisse’s Luxe, calme, et volupté left him awestruck. Its boldly subjective use of pure colour encouraged Dufy to free himself from a direct representation of reality and instead push his art into new realms of subjective vision. ‘At the sight of that picture,’ he recalled, ‘I understood the new raison d’être of painting, and Impressionist realism lost all its charm for me as I looked at this miracle of creative imagination at work in colour and line. I immediately grasped the mechanics of art’ (Dufy, quoted in M. Giry, Fauvism: Origins and Development, New York, 1982, p. 135). Returning to his native Le Havre that summer, Dufy’s depictions of life in the coastal hubs of Trouville and Sainte-Adresse became invigorated by a new sense of vibrancy and colour. Speaking about this period of transition in his art, Dufy explained: ‘I had previously painted beaches in the manner of the Impressionists, and had reached saturation point, realizing that this method of copying nature was leading me off into infinity, with its twists and turns, and its most subtle and fleeting details. I myself was standing outside the picture. Having arrived at some beach subject or other I would sit down and start looking at my tubes of paint and my brushes. How, using these things, could I succeed in conveying not what I see, but that which is, that which exists for me, my reality?’ (Dufy, quoted in D. Perez-Tibi, Dufy, London, 1989, pp. 22-23). It was this desire to translate his personal experience of the landscape onto canvas that drove Dufy to continue his experimentations with this new artistic vocabulary.
  
  The Normandy coast had undergone a remarkable transformation during the first half of the Nineteenth Century as the development of fast rail connections to and from the capital led to the development of a thriving summertime tourist industry in the region. Traditional fishing villages along the C?te Fleurie quickly developed into seaside resorts, complete with new villas, grand hotels and casinos that catered to the fashionable Parisians who travelled in their droves for sojourns by the sea during the summer months. Eugène Boudin and Claude Monet were both drawn to the area in the 1860s and 1870s, and recorded life on the modern beach, painting the holidaymakers as they traversed the promenades and gathered on the sandy beaches to reap the health benefits of the fresh sea air. The works they produced helped to shape the identity of the Normandy coastline in the public imagination, influencing the perception of Parisians looking to escape the overwhelming heat and commotion of city life for the more relaxing sea-side location. However, whereas many of the later impressionist views of the area were selectively edited to emphasise the untouched, idyllic aspects of the landscape, Dufy’s beach scenes from the early 1900s revel in the bustling atmosphere of the holiday resorts. Focusing on the hotels, cafes, and cabanas for hire, as well as the stylish people that populated them, Dufy threw a spotlight on to the vibrant, energetic holiday mood of towns such as Trouville, Deauville, and Sainte-Adresse.
  
  Depicting a typical beach scene of the period, Dufy’s composition is teeming with bathers and parasol wielding holidaymakers as they gather on the sandy shoreline at Trouville, enjoying the sunshine and clear skies of a mid-summer day. Sporting an array of colourful, elegant costumes, the crowd turn their gaze in apparent unison to the horizon line, where a single ship is silhouetted against the sky. Some figures shelter from the heat beneath the distinctive striped cabanas that were a common feature along the beaches of the Normandy coast, but most remain in the open sunlight, their attention absorbed entirely by the boat as it moves through the water. Their gestures and attitudes are swiftly recorded by the artist with a sense of spontaneity, their outlines captured in a series of fluid, loose brushstrokes of pure colour. Dufy’s free handling of paint imbues their elegant costumes with a gentle sense of movement, creating the impression that the edges of their coats and the elegant hemlines of their dresses are caught in the delicate sea breeze that licks the coast. The sharp diagonal raised walkway that extends out towards the sea and above the crowds casts a striking profile in the left hand side of the composition, while the men and women shown promenading along its length hint at the complex social codes that governed life in the summer seaside resorts at this time. The objective of visiting the seaside was often not solely for health reasons – visitors were drawn to the resorts as it was the fashionable thing to do, travelling there to see and be seen by the great and good of Parisian society. Constantly on view, they wore their finest garments at all times, often purchasing special costumes for their holidays, so that their fellow beachgoers could admire them. This sense of voyeuristic exchange is evident in La plage et L’estacade de Trouville, in the way that the figures on the walkway gaze down at the crowd below, their attention caught not by the ship in the distance, but rather by the people who surround them.
  
  While the activity of the beach offered an intriguing subject for Dufy, it is his use of colour and the range of tones that he employs that imbues the scene with such a festive atmosphere. The beach, for example, is composed of a myriad of individual strokes of pure colour, ranging from peachy pink to pale mint green, underpinned by subtle shades of lilac, lemon, and blue. Adding the occasional highlight of red, the ground seems to come alive underneath the figures, as the artist captures a sense of the glittering effect of the sun as it reflects off the sand. The sky, meanwhile, is brushed with delicate pastel tones, from a warm yellow glow through effervescent shades of green, to the beautiful blue that sits alongside with the rich turquoise of the Atlantic Ocean, embellished with touches of white and blue-violet. The use of a common tonality in both the sky and the water creates a sense of unity within the composition, with the great expanse of blue providing Dufy with a bold block of colour against which to set the figurative and architectural elements of the scene. The richness of these colour transitions, combined with the simplification of form and the loose, free brushwork that make up the scattering of tents, parasols and figures in the scene, owe a clear debt to the fauvist experiments of Derain and Matisse. However, there also remains a distinctly impressionist inflection to the tones Dufy uses, as the nuances of the northern light are captured in noticeably more pastel tones than in the work of some of his fauvist contemporaries. In this way, La plage et L’estacade de Trouville marks the beginning of Dufy’s adventures in Fauvism, as he combined elements of both his recent impressionist past with the most cutting edge developments of the French avant-garde.

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Other paintings by Raoul Dufy:

The Baths of the Marie-Christine Casino at Sainte-Adresse

The Bay of Sainte-Adresse

The Beach at Havre

The Beach at Sainte Adresse