Raoul Dufy

André Meyer, New York
Private Collection (a gift from the above by 1964)
Thence by descent to the present owner

The canvas is not lined. UV examination reveals a few small retouchings in places, including some small spots to the lower right quadrant, a thin vertical line to the upper left corner and some very tiny spots to the centre of the upper edge. There are a few very fine lines of craquelure to some of the thicker impasto pigments, which are entirely stable and not visually distracting. Otherwise, this work is in overall very good condition.
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Painted just a year after the notorious debut of Fauvism at the Salon d’Automne of 1905, La Promenade is testament to Dufy’s excitement about this radical and liberating new way of painting. Executed in 1906, the present work is the product of the artist's most important and ground-breaking period. It was in 1905 that Dufy had first encountered Matisse’s masterpiece Luxe, Calme et Volupté (1904-05, Musée d’Orsay), a work which had such a significant and immediate impact on him that he noted, ‘at the sight of this picture, I understood all the new reasons for painting, and Impressionist realism lost its charm for me as I contemplated this miracle of imagination introduced into design and colour.’ The feverish colouration and energy, together with Dufy’s bold use of negative space in the foreground, make La Promenadea resolutely modern composition.

Though it is hard to imagine now, when Fauve works were first shown in the 1905 Salon d'Automne in Paris, they created a real scandal and eyewitness accounts tell of laughter emanating from room VII where they were displayed. Gertrude Stein revealed the extent of the shock in her reports that people had even scratched at the canvases in scorn. ‘A pot of paint has been flung in the face of the public’ was the reaction by the critic Camille Mauclair. Louis Vauxcelles described the work with the now legendary phrase ‘Donatello au milieu des fauves!’ (Donatello among the wild beasts), referring to a Renaissance-style sculpture that shared the room with them. His comment was printed in the 17th October 1905 edition of the daily newspaper Gil Blas, and the term was very quickly absorbed into widespread usage. Fauvism took the spontaneous ‘en plein air’ painting approach, first employed by the Impressionists, to a much bolder level: the brushwork became more gestural, more spirited, and surfaces were striking for their rich impasto and pure vibrant colour. What seemed to shock the 1905 museum-going public the most though, was what they perceived to be the unfinished nature of these works, clearly not understanding that this was a quite deliberate move on the part of the artists to allow their colour to sing even more vividly. As Sarah Whitfield has argued, with Fauve paintings, ‘the unpainted areas of canvas give off as much light as the strokes of colour; they are spaces which radiate the energy of colour while remaining colourless’ (ibid., p. 69).

Any detailed individual characteristics of the figures of the present work are forfeited by Dufy in favour of evoking the general dynamism and atmosphere of the scene as a whole. All this he does with a remarkable confidence and assured economy of line. While Dufy’s earlier works are characterised by a softness of line and a blended surface, here the paint is applied in broad strokes and with a raw physicality which cannot help but bring us closer to the frenzied inspiration of the artist’s process. La Promenade is an important and wonderfully joyful interpretation of the bustling atmosphere of a street scene, a painting that celebrates the colour and energy to be found in everyday life.