Etude pour Golfe-Juan

In 1919, Dufy took his first extended trip to the South of France, where the Mediterranean sun and the lush vegetation made an immediate and significant impression on him. Inspired by his time in the region, he began to incorporate broad, bright color imbued with a calligraphic line developing what would become trademarks of his mature style. As Grace L. McCann Morley explains, “It was in the twenties that Dufy adopted the peculiar conventions of color characteristic of so many of his oils and watercolors for two decades. The arrangement of bands of color to establish a composition…and application of color independent of forms and their contours became the rule. The result is an abstract color composition which exists and functions on its own terms…the result of his long research in color as the expression of light. Like the local colors that spill over the outline of the forms, they have the effect of suggesting movement” (Raoul Dufy, exh. cat., San Francisco Museum of Art, 1954, p. 18).
In the present work, the idyllic tranquility of Golfe-Juan is finely realized with the artist’s distinctive palette of soft blues which suffuse across the canvas. Bands of red dot the background, corresponding to the roofs of the houses along the horizon. Painted in glaze-like layers, the composition takes on a dreamy, ethereal quality with its languid brushwork delineating the perspective. Here Dufy, the devoted colorist and painter of the Midi, has captured the duality of the light in the South of France, subtle yet intense.