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Lot Essay
Raoul Dufy is best known as a painter of modern spectacles; concerts, parties, fashion shows, horse and boat races are among his most iconic subjects. The artist devoted several canvases to the annual regatta at Cowes, a port on the Isle of Wright, situated directly across the English Channel from Le Havre, the coastal Normandy town where he was born. Dufy's depiction of the boat race in Régates à Cowes is a nod toward the Fauvist and Cubist influences of his youth: rectangular flags and triangular sails form flat planes of exuberant color against the seemingly endless sea.
In this work, Dufy provided a novel aerial perspective of the water, the cobalt blue of which appears to blend into the sky above. In her monograph on the artist, art historian Dora Perez-Tibi described the unique pictorial effect of Dufy's immersive, watery worlds: "Dufy uses [the expanse of the sea] as a vertical backdrop with sailboats and steamers attached to it, portrayed with precision, but with no variation in scale according to their real proximity or distance: for the painter it was enough that they should provide a rhythm to the composition with their flags and raised masts. The decorative harmony of the multicoloured flags and the smoke, mingling their coloured arabesques with those of the clouds, contributes to the evocation of an atmosphere of festivity and jubilation" (Dufy, Paris, 1997, p. 152).
Dufy was not the first modern painter to use the seascape or sailboat as a subject for artistic exploration; several Impressionists and Post-Impressionists also took on this genre. Claude Monet, for example, painted the regattas at Saint Adresse and Argenteuil several times between the summers of 1867 and 1874 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and Musée d'Orsay, Paris). Unlike his predecessors, however, Dufy was more interested in the overall visual impact of color and shape than in the ephemeral elements of light, wind and weather that preoccupied Monet. Dufy also chose to eliminate the human participants and spectators in the boat race, as well as the shoreline itself. He focused instead on the vessels floating on the surface of the water and the banners flickering in the air above.
Dufy returned to this regatta several times over the course of the next several years, producing many variations on the same theme. Régates à Cowes is particularly comparable in subject and composition to a painting in the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., which dates to 1934. Both paintings depict a similar fleet of sails and flags against the surface of the water. The National Gallery picture, however, is smaller and less detailed than the present work.
Régates à Cowes once belonged to Marie Cuttoli, a major patron, textile dealer and designer who collaborated with many Cubist and Surrealist painters, including George Braque, Fernand Léger, Joan Miró and Pablo Picasso to create tapestried of their works in the early twentieth century. She also commissioned Dufy to execute several modern designs for tapestries and furniture upholstery, which were woven at the Aubusson atelier in the 1930s. Cuttoli donated the majority of her collection of avant garde paintings and tapestries to the Musée Nationale d’Art Moderne in Paris in 1963.
In this work, Dufy provided a novel aerial perspective of the water, the cobalt blue of which appears to blend into the sky above. In her monograph on the artist, art historian Dora Perez-Tibi described the unique pictorial effect of Dufy's immersive, watery worlds: "Dufy uses [the expanse of the sea] as a vertical backdrop with sailboats and steamers attached to it, portrayed with precision, but with no variation in scale according to their real proximity or distance: for the painter it was enough that they should provide a rhythm to the composition with their flags and raised masts. The decorative harmony of the multicoloured flags and the smoke, mingling their coloured arabesques with those of the clouds, contributes to the evocation of an atmosphere of festivity and jubilation" (Dufy, Paris, 1997, p. 152).
Dufy was not the first modern painter to use the seascape or sailboat as a subject for artistic exploration; several Impressionists and Post-Impressionists also took on this genre. Claude Monet, for example, painted the regattas at Saint Adresse and Argenteuil several times between the summers of 1867 and 1874 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and Musée d'Orsay, Paris). Unlike his predecessors, however, Dufy was more interested in the overall visual impact of color and shape than in the ephemeral elements of light, wind and weather that preoccupied Monet. Dufy also chose to eliminate the human participants and spectators in the boat race, as well as the shoreline itself. He focused instead on the vessels floating on the surface of the water and the banners flickering in the air above.
Dufy returned to this regatta several times over the course of the next several years, producing many variations on the same theme. Régates à Cowes is particularly comparable in subject and composition to a painting in the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., which dates to 1934. Both paintings depict a similar fleet of sails and flags against the surface of the water. The National Gallery picture, however, is smaller and less detailed than the present work.
Régates à Cowes once belonged to Marie Cuttoli, a major patron, textile dealer and designer who collaborated with many Cubist and Surrealist painters, including George Braque, Fernand Léger, Joan Miró and Pablo Picasso to create tapestried of their works in the early twentieth century. She also commissioned Dufy to execute several modern designs for tapestries and furniture upholstery, which were woven at the Aubusson atelier in the 1930s. Cuttoli donated the majority of her collection of avant garde paintings and tapestries to the Musée Nationale d’Art Moderne in Paris in 1963.