Raoul Dufy

Private Collection, France (acquired circa 1930)

Dufy claimed that the decisive turning point in his career occurred at the Salon d’Automne of 1905, where he saw Matisse’s revolutionary painting, Luxe, calme et volupté (now in the Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris). At that point, claimed Dufy, 'I understood the new raison d’être of painting and impressionist realism lost its charm for me as I beheld this miracle of the creative imagination at play, in colour and drawing' (quoted in J. Lassaigne, Dufy, New York, n.d., p. 22). Adopting the emerging Fauve style, Dufy incorporated the same bright palette in his own work, but he also personalised his manner by incorporating softer hues such as pale pink, turquoise, and yellow, and the use of black. These colours afforded greater scope for depicting outdoor scenes, often featuring the races at Deauville, the casino at Nice, or lively Bal Champêtre, a theme made famous by Renoir in his Moulin de la Galette (fig. 1).

Dufy painted the present work in 1906, which proved to be a seminal year in the career of the young artist. He exhibited in both the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon d’Automne, and opened his first one-man show at the gallery of Berthe Weill in Paris. Moreover, 1906 heralded Dufy’s widespread recognition as an artist and marked the advent of his Fauve years. As Dora Perez-Tibi has noted, 'He had become aware of the need to recreate observed reality in terms of his own "reality", and now went on to elaborate his theory of "couleur-lumière", with which he experimented during these two years, and which he would apply to his entire œuvre' (D. Perez-Tibi, Dufy, New York, 1989, pp. 23 & 24).

FIG. 1, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Moulin de la Galette, 1876, oil on canvas, Musée d'Orsay, Paris