.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Fanny Guillon-Laffaille will include this painting in her forthcoming second volume of the Raoul Dufy catalogue raisonné de l'oeuvre peint.
Bastille Day, the French national holiday, commemorates the storming of the Bastille, which took place on 14 July 1789 and marked the beginning of the French Revolution. The Bastille was a prison and a symbol of the absolute and arbitrary power of Louis the 16th's ancien régime. Capturing the prison marked the end of the monarchy, the birth of the sovereign Nation, and, eventually, the creation of the (First) Republic, in 1792. Bastille Day was declared the French national holiday on 6 July 1880, on Benjamin Raspail's recommendation, when the new Republic was firmly entrenched.
Judi Freeman wrote that Dufy "shared the Impressionist enthusiasm for the annual transformation of cities and towns for Bastille Day on July 14th and other flag-waving celebrations. Whereas Manet and Monet occasionally painted Parisian boulevards adorned with flags for patriotic holidays, Dufy and Marquet regularly depicted the festivities. For the Impressionist the flag-draped streets provided an opportunity to show a colorful festival of modern life, occasionally tinged with political overtones. For Dufy and Marquet the holiday provided motifs that could be situated within the Impressionist tradition but more loosely rendered, with the sketchier brushworks and scattered, almost random color (in "The Distant Cousins in Normandy: Braque, Dufy and Friesz," The Fauve Landscape, New York, 1990, pp. 221-222).
Bastille Day, the French national holiday, commemorates the storming of the Bastille, which took place on 14 July 1789 and marked the beginning of the French Revolution. The Bastille was a prison and a symbol of the absolute and arbitrary power of Louis the 16th's ancien régime. Capturing the prison marked the end of the monarchy, the birth of the sovereign Nation, and, eventually, the creation of the (First) Republic, in 1792. Bastille Day was declared the French national holiday on 6 July 1880, on Benjamin Raspail's recommendation, when the new Republic was firmly entrenched.
Judi Freeman wrote that Dufy "shared the Impressionist enthusiasm for the annual transformation of cities and towns for Bastille Day on July 14th and other flag-waving celebrations. Whereas Manet and Monet occasionally painted Parisian boulevards adorned with flags for patriotic holidays, Dufy and Marquet regularly depicted the festivities. For the Impressionist the flag-draped streets provided an opportunity to show a colorful festival of modern life, occasionally tinged with political overtones. For Dufy and Marquet the holiday provided motifs that could be situated within the Impressionist tradition but more loosely rendered, with the sketchier brushworks and scattered, almost random color (in "The Distant Cousins in Normandy: Braque, Dufy and Friesz," The Fauve Landscape, New York, 1990, pp. 221-222).