Alon Zakaim Fine Art

Jean Dufy was born in Le Havre in 1888, into a family with ten siblings including another aspiring painter, Raoul. Jean Dufy found his true calling when he discovered the paintings of Matisse, Derain, and Picasso at the 1906 Le Havre exposition.

After his military service from 1910 to 1912, Jean moved to Paris and grew acquainted with Derain, Braque, Picasso, and Apollinaire. In his first watercolours, which were shown at the Berthe Weill gallery in 1914, muted tones and somber browns, blues, and reds mingle with the hatching technique he inherited from Cezanne by way of his brother Raoul Dufy.

Jean was drafted shortly after this first exposition. This did not stop him from painting and drawing the flowers, horses, and landscapes he discovered in places such as Val-d’Ajol, in the Vosges region, where he was given medical treatment upon returning from the war.

Two events in the postwar Parisian cultural scene greatly inspired the artist’s creative output: the 1920 comedy Le Bœuf sur le toit, gave him the chance to meet the great French musicians of the era; and La Revue Nègre, in 1925, which crystallized the marriage of colour and music in his paintings. During this period, Jean also paid homage to the Fratellini brothers, painting circuses, clowns, horses, and athletes. He utilized the lyrical language of colour, played with light, and had a penchant for the liberal use of white, a style for which he became well known.

Over the following years, Dufy’s stay in Le Havre gave rise to majestic works such as Le quai Videcoq au Havre, 1929, which features a perfect harmony of colours. Honfleur, his mother’s birthplace, Villefranche-sur-Mer, which he began visiting in 1920, and the Limousin and Touraine regions, where he lived with his wife for part of the year, inspired other highlights of his oeuvre, featuring views of forests, valleys, and the Chateau du Lion, for example.

Jean devoted the years between 1950 and 1960 to travel, mostly in Europe (Italy, Greece, England, Ireland, Austria, Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, Spain, and Portugal) and North Africa. But he remained loyal to Paris for 35 years, part of a long tradition that includes his contemporaries Aragon, Hemingway, and Prévert, who described it, and Utrillo, Chagall, and Marquet, who painted it. In his oil paintings and watercolors, Jean Dufy chose to represent the city using a constantly evolving creative process dominated by a harmony of blue tones. For Jean, blue was an insatiable source of inspiration for the Gates of Paris, the streets, the horse-drawn carriages, the Eiffel Tower, the sky, and the Seine. This is also evident in Voiliers in which he uses a variety of blue tones in his depiction of sailboats juxtaposed against the sea and sky.

Jean Dufy passed away on May 12, 1964, in La Boissière in the village of Boussay, two months after the death of his wife Ismérie.

Voiliers

Oil on canvas

41.0 x 23.8 cm

£ 16,000.00 GBP

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