Les pêcheurs

Details

Raoul Dufy (1877-1953)
Les pêcheurs
signed 'R Dufy' (lower right and lower left)
oil on canvas
18 1/8 x 21 3/4 in. (45.9 x 55.1 cm.)
Painted circa 1905

Provenance

Private collection, France, by 1984, and thence by descent to the present owner.

Literature

M. Laffaille, Raoul Dufy, Catalogue raisonné de l'œuvre peint, vol. I, Geneva, 1972, no. 107, p. 100 (illustrated).

Exhibited

Lille, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Un demi-siècle de peinture française, 1900-1950, June - July 1950.

Further details

Painted in 1905, Les pêcheurs is a work from Raoul Dufy’s early Fauve period. Boldly depicting a moment in the bustling life of the port of Rouen, it demonstrates the upheaval which occurred in the artist’s work. At the Salon des Indépendants, Dufy had admired Luxe, calme et volupté (Museum of Modern Art, Paris), a masterpiece by Henri Matisse painted in 1904. Dufy then turned his back on his previous investigations once and for all and said "I understood the new raison d'être of painting and impressionist realism lost its charm for me as I beheld this miracle of the creative imagination at play, in colour and drawing" (quoted in M. Berr de Turique, Raoul Dufy, Paris, 1930, pp. 80-82).

In Les pêcheurs, Dufy simplified the shapes and used a range of vivid colours dominated by broad expanses of pinks and turquoises. He thus gave the composition life and breathed energy into the characters, no longer seeking to represent reality but rather reality as he saw it.