DIMENSIONS: (unframed) 22.1 x 29.8 ins
SIGNATURE: Signed lower right
MEDIUM: Gouache on paper
P.O.A.
Out Of Stock
DIMENSIONS: (unframed) 22.1 x 29.8 ins
SIGNATURE: Signed lower right
MEDIUM: Gouache on paper
This work will be included in Fanny Guillon-Laffaille’s forthcoming supplement to the catalogue raisonné.
One of Raoul Dufy’s favoured subjects, this beautiful work on paper shows the paddock full of horses, jockeys and people before the race. Anticipation is high as the viewer’s and jockeys prepare for the event. Interested parties are seen milling around making predictions about the outcome whilst in the upper right background a horse rears in excitement. Dufy loved to depict paddocks and the races and these were themes he returned to time and time again.
Collection of H. Potez;
Sale: Hôtel Drouot Paris, 19 March 1996, lot 6;
Private collection, Europe;
Sale: Hôtel Drouot Paris, 19 June 2009, lot 127;
Private collection, France (acquired at the above sale);
Private collection, Europe (by descent)
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Raoul Dufy was born into a large family at Le Havre, in Normandy. He left school at the age of fourteen to work in a coffee-importing company. In 1895, when he was 18, he started taking evening classes in art at Le Havre’s École d’Art (municipal art school). The classes were taught by Charles L’huillier, who had been, forty years earlier, a student of the remarkable French portrait-painter, Ingres. There, Dufy met Raymond Lecourt and Othon Friesz with whom he later shared a studio in Montmartre and to whom he remained a lifelong friend. During this period, Dufy painted mostly Norman landscapes in watercolours.
In 1900, after a year of military service, Dufy won a scholarship to the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where again he crossed paths with Othon Friesz. (He was there when Georges Braque also was studying.) He concentrated on improving his drawing skills. The impressionist landscape painters, such as Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro, influenced Dufy profoundly.
His first exhibition (at the Exhibition of French Artists) took place in 1901. Introduced to Berthe Weill in 1902, Dufy showed his work in her gallery. Then he exhibited again in 1903 at the Salon des Indépendants. A boost to his confidence: the painter, Maurice Denis, bought one of his paintings. Dufy continued to paint, often in the vicinity of Le Havre, and, in particular, on the beach at Sainte-Adresse, made famous by Eugene Boudin and Claude Monet. In 1904, with his friend, Albert Marquet, he worked in Fecamp on the English Channel.
Henri Matisse’s Luxe, Calme et Volupté, which Dufy saw at the Salon des Indépendants in 1905, was a revelation to the young artist, and it directed his interests towards Fauvism. Les Fauves (the wild beasts) emphasized bright colour and bold contours in their work. Dufy’s painting reflected this aesthetic until about 1909, when contact with the work of Paul Cézanne led him to adopt a somewhat subtler technique. It was not until 1920, however, after he had flirted briefly with yet another style, cubism, that Dufy developed his own distinctive approach. It involved skeletal structures, arranged with foreshortened perspective, and the use of thin washes of colour applied quickly, in a manner that came to be known as stenographic.