Raoul Dufy (French, 1877-1953). Deauville: le retour des régattes, 1934. Oil on canvas. 11 x 27-1/2 inches (27.9 x 69.9 ...

Description

Raoul Dufy (French, 1877-1953)
Deauville: le retour des régattes, 1934
Oil on canvas
11 x 27-1/2 inches (27.9 x 69.9 cm)
Signed and dated lower left: Raoul Dufy / 1934

Property from a Private Collection

PROVENANCE:
Etienne Bignou, New York;
Private collection, New York, acquired from the above, 1935;
Thence by descent;
Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York.

LITERATURE:
M. Laffaille, Raoul Dufy: Catalogue raisonné de l'oeuvre peint, Geneva, 1973, vol. II, p. 349, no. 861, illustrated.

This lot is accompanied by the original invoice from Etienne Bignou, signed by him and dated November 23, 1935.

Painter Raoul Dufy was born in Le Havre, on France's Channel coast. Throughout his long career as one of the finest and freshest colorists of his generation, he depicted scenes of boating, beach-going, and other maritime leisure activities with joyous abandon that underscored his intense affection for having grown up near the water.

For approximately a decade (late 1920s - late 1930s), Dufy painted a series of long panoramic scenes of regattas on the Deauville basin, which separates the resort towns of Deauville and Trouville situated next to one another on the northern French coast. In these delightful images, sailboats in many shapes, sizes and colors dance on choppy waters, where they are filling or drying their sails. Dufy rendered them with his distinctive stylized notation of quick strokes: a scattering of short, curved dabs for the waves, tiny blocks of color for the quayside buildings, and rough, abbreviated marks for the sailors aboard ship. The unlabored appearance of Dufy's way of working evokes an overall mood of breeziness and gaiety, which rested at the heart of his approach to artmaking.

In this and related regatta views, Dufy jettisoned traditional perspective in favor or a frieze-like approach to designing a painting: "I have noticed that greater expressive force is obtained when all the objects are placed in a plane parallel to the observer and not perpendicular, which creates a vanishing point and tends to pierce the background."


More information about Raoul Dufy. See also: Dufy, Raoul Artist.



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