Le réservoir à Golfe-Juan, à l'oiseau

In 1919, Dufy took an extended trip to the South of France, where the Mediterranean sun and lush vegetation made an immediate impression on him. He began to incorporate broad bright color with calligraphic line, developing what was to become his trademark style. As Grace L. McCann Morley writes, "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 in the artist’s distinctive palette of lush green and deep blue to delineate the trees and sky. Bands of red dot the background, depicting the roofs of homes on the horizon. The stillness of the pool in the foreground, framed by the tall trees and overlooking the expansive landscape, imbues the scene with a calm sense of stillness—indeed the only movement on this hot day is the bird which swoops down into the pool to take a drink of water. Here, Dufy, the devoted colorist, has brilliantly captured the intensity of the light and colors in the South of France.