Raoul Dufy: Painter of Life and Joy

Raoul Dufy is one of the most celebrated artists of the 20th Century. Praised for his depictions of French and English society, his work reflects their world of chateaux, boating regattas, race meetings and concerts.

Born in Le Havre in 1887, Dufy spent his early years looking out on the boats in the harbour and the bourgeoisie promenading along the shore. On moving to Paris with his childhood friend Othon Friesz in 1900, he was, through the introduction of Georges Braque, a fellow native of Le Havre, thrust into a very different city. Paris was filled with endless opportunities for entertainment and on the verge of societal change. It was these fervent environments, brimming with life, that provided the inspiration for his art.

Dufy’s vibrant brushwork, vivid colour palette and precocious talent ensured his success. Alongside his fauve contemporaries, Henri Matisse, André Derain and Braque, he forged a revolution in the use of colour, breaking from the strictures of the Paris Salon. The Salon deemed what was considered acceptable in fine art and favoured the classical, a sentiment that Dufy rejected in his embrace of innovative pictorial structures and expressive line. Dufy’s practice was radical in that he treated colour separately from subject matter, abandoned perspective and embraced decoration.

Emerging from the destruction of the First World War, Dufy’s work offered a sense of optimism and relief to a society that had undergone so much trauma. His paintings focus upon life’s pleasures, a subject that over the years artists have tended to shy away from. It raises questions as to why introspection is now often held in higher regard than conviviality, particularly when much of today’s media is based on aspirational imagery.