Dufy observed and recorded those in high society pursuing their pastimes, scenes that produced some of his most celebrated works. ‘La maison des canotiers’ comes from an important series Dufy worked on for over six years. These joyful boat scenes likely depicted the Marne River, situated on the eastern outskirts of Paris. An escape from chaos of the city, the area was a favoured subject for a number of artists from the end of the 19th and into the 20th century including Marquet, Cézanne and Pissarro.

During the 1920s and early 1930s Dufy was at the peak of his powers both in terms of the development of his own visual identity and it’s critical reception. Many of his most celebrated works were produced from this period. ‘La maison des canotiers’ is an exemplar of this. Painted with a variety of dynamic brushstrokes to elegantly convey the movement of the figures, the composition sits upon broad washes of pure colour.

‘La maison des canotiers’ has an important provenance having first been in the collection of the English watercolourist Walter Taylor who was a contemporary and close friend of Walter Sickert. Taylor likely sold ‘La maison des canotiers’ to John Hay Whitney, the former US Ambassador to the United Kingdom and president to Museum of Modern Art. So celebrated was Whitney’s collection, that in 1960 Tate Gallery held an exhibition of sixty seven of his works.

A closely related composition to ‘La maison des canotiers’ is now in the collection of Centre Pompidou (‘Canotiers à Nogent’, 1925), while other examples from the series are in such institutions as The Phillips Collection, Washington (‘La Marne’, 1938).