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  • Raoul Dufy
    Jun 3, 1877 - Mar 23, 1953
  • Epsom - 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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  • Raoul Dufy
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  • 1937
    gouache and watercolor on paper laid down on board

    Fanny Guillon-Laffaille will include this work in her forthcoming supplement to the Raoul Dufy catalogue raisonné des aquarelles, gouaches, et pastels.

    Dufy's fascination with horse racing was initially inspired by his collaboration with the fashion designer Paul Poiret, who in 1909 commissioned the artist to create the stationary for his fashion house, and the textile patterns used in its fabrics and garments. Poiret's signature dresses were flamboyantly sported by the ladies attending the races in Paris, Nice, Deauville, and, of course, the even more fashionable English race courses at Epsom and Ascot. Poiret urged Dufy to study the silhouettes, fashionable dress, and interactions of the sociable crowd of spectators as well as the horses captured in mid-race and the activity in the paddocks.

    Dufy was immediately drawn to the exhilarating atmosphere surrounding the race itself and began to experiment with the subject of horse races as early as 1913. His first depiction of the paddocks were very stylized watercolors, focusing on the audience of élégantes, dandies and jockeys attending the races at Deauville. In the 1920s, his attention to the public's attire grew stronger, and he dedicated a series of gouaches to Poiret's models (Les mannequins de Poiret), whom he captured in still, frieze-like compositions, influenced by 1920s fashion advertising. With his discovery of Epsom and Ascot in the 1930s, Dufy's compositions became more ambitious--he started depicting the whole course, as seen from a bird's eye-view.

    In Epsom, painted in 1937, Dufy has captured the moment at the beginning of the race, when the elegant spectators stroll leisurely in the foreground waiting for the competition to begin. The stillness of the race course with its cool greens creates a stark contrast against the colorful crowds. Dufy employed couleur-lumière to these works, a technique that emphasized color over the shading properties of black and white, and allowed the artist to convey light in a distinct way. As Dora Perez-Tibi describes, "these racecourse scenes--whether in France, at Deauville, Lonchamp or Chantilly or, in England, at Epson, Ascot or Goodwood--allowed Dufy to put his couleur-lumière theory into practice...he decided to convey light by means of colour; the absence of colour represents the unlit area...For Dufy, the balance of the composition comes from the distribution of all the points of the composition " (in Dufy, New York, 1989, pp. 158-162). Epsom reveals Dufy's extraordinary ability to convey the vivacious atmosphere that pervades the spectacle and social event of horse racing.

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Other paintings by Raoul Dufy:

Elegant and Elegant on the Lawn
Elegant and Elegant on the Lawn
Elegant at the Races
Elegant at the Races
Epsom, the Race
Epsom, the Race
Epsom, the Race (Epsom, la course)
Epsom, the Race (Epsom, la course)
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.