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  • Raoul Dufy
    Jun 3, 1877 - Mar 23, 1953
  • The River 1905 - 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 River 1905
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  • The River 1905

  • Raoul Dufy
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  • La rivière, circa 1905
    Oil on canvas
    25 3/4 x 32 1/8 in. (65.4 x 81.6 cm.)

    Born in 1877, Raoul Dufy was twenty-three years old at the dawn of the 20th Century. He was therefore uniquely poised to experience both the academicism of 19th Century painting, epitomized by his lessons at Léon Bonnat's atelier, and the radical innovations of the coming era. At the time the present work was executed, Dufy was living in Paris, working in a studio at 31 Quai Bourbon, and associating with a circle of artists that included Emile-Othon Friesz, Albert Marquet and Georges Braque. It is therefore unsurprising that the earliest traces of both Fauvism's originality of color and Cubism's advances in form can be witnessed in the paintings of Dufy's early Parisian period.

    The present landscape was executed in 1905, the same year that the critic Louis Vauxcelles coined the term "Fauves" to designate Henri Matisse, André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck, Albert Marquet and Henri Manguin the "wild beasts" of that year's Salon d'Automne. It was also the year that Dufy saw Henri Matisse's 1904 painting Luxe, Calme, et Volupté at the Salon des Indépendants. He was profoundly struck by the large painting, declaring it "a miracle of the creative imagination at play in color and line." Though the present work adheres to natural color more than Derain's Collioure, Le village et la mer of the same year (fig. 1), Dufy's Fauvist inclinations are evident in his painting's ice-blue hills, and in the pink and purple accents that punctuate the landscape. In the canvas's upper corners, Dufy makes use of the same small, parallel strokes employed by Derain, a technique that adds a decorative rhythm to the composition.

    If Matisse and the Fauves influenced Dufy's use of color, the influence of Paul Cézanne lent density and structure to Dufy's early pictures. As Philippe Dagen points out in his essay "Des préoccuptations exclusives de technique? Dufy, Cézanne, l'impressionisme et le fauvisme," by 1905 Dufy would have seen Cézanne's canvases and watercolors at the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon d'Automne, as well as at Ambroise Vollard's gallery (Raoul Dufy, exh. cat., Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon, 1999, p. 34). The effect of Cézanne's proto-Cubist planarity can be witnessed in the angular solidity of the house and surrounding rooftops in Dufy's landscape. Further, in the painting's lower right corner, the parallel strokes have become more structural than ornamental, suggesting substantial form over mere pattern.

    Alfred Werner effectively summarizes this dual influence on Dufy, writing that "from the Fauves [Dufy] learned to simplify forms and to apply color in violent juxtaposition for the sake of utmost expressiveness; from Cézanne he learned the secret of producing, through the architectural organization of planes, the effect of things existing in space" (Raoul Dufy, New York, 1953, n.p.). The present work bears evidence of both of these major innovations in early 20th Century painting.

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Other paintings by Raoul Dufy:

The Return of Regattas 1933
The Return of Regattas 1933
The River
The River
The Road to Vence
The Road to Vence
The Rooftops, seen from the Rue Seguier
The Rooftops, seen from the Rue Seguier
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.