Lot 161 D

In this gouache Raoul Dufy has laid out and thoroughly enjoyed telling the story of a Mediterranean scene filled with the lightness of summer. The radiant blue of the Mediterranean Sea provides the setting within which viewers, together with the artist, gaze at a still life of fruit that is grandly composed but whose depiction makes only sparing use of the means of painting and - beyond it, over the balustrade of a balcony - at swimmers, sailing boats and steamboats bustling about in the water.
Dufy works with fields of colour in an intense red and multiple shades of blue, into which he has sketchily inscribed the elements of the picture - fruit, balustrade, ships and swimmers - in black, red and white. The chromatic impression is reminiscent, perhaps not coincidentally, of the national colours of France. Dufy had become familiar with the employment of luminous colour and its use as an autonomous pictorial device through the works of Henri Matisse and André Derain at the Salon des Indépendants in 1905, and it fascinated the young painter so much that he joined the Fauve artists. An intense tonality, particularly the blue of his regatta pictures, characterised his oeuvre from that time on.