La fenêtre à Nice

Dufy visited the South of France frequently in the 1920s and 1930s, staying mainly in Nice, his wife's place of birth. Here he was fascinated with the strength and intensity of the light, much as he had been on his trip to Sicily in the early 1920s and during his first visit to North Africa in 1926. The light of the south permitted him to reconsider his pictorial surface by rearranging it into broad areas of colour which are distributed across the composition. 'Light is the soul of colour', he wrote, '...without light, colour is lifeless' (letter to A. Lhote, 1943, quoted in J. Lassaigne, Raoul Dufy, Geneva 1951, p. 30). Dufy's notion of couleur-lumière enabled him to re-invent the light and distribute it across distinct planes, placing more emphasis on tonal relations and their equivalent in light than on true colour.

The present work depicts the Gulf of Nice, framed by the shutters and balustrade of a balcony. This pictorial conceit, so often a preoccupation for artists concerned with the definition of space, was one that Dufy had explored to great effect at different points in his career, not least in the early days. The iconographic element of the window allows Dufy to link the interior with the exterior and to further create unity of the pictorial plane. The open door acts as a frame for the landscape beyond and gives a greater sense of depth to the coast stretching away from the surface of the work.