Raoul Dufy: Painter of Joyful Colour and Modern Life

Raoul Dufy (1877–1953) was a French painter, designer, and illustrator renowned for his vibrant depictions of regattas, concerts, and modern city life. Born in Le Havre, Normandy, on 3 June 1877, he was the second of eleven children in a musical family. At fourteen, he left school to work for a coffee-importing company while taking evening art classes at the École des Beaux-Arts in Le Havre under the tutelage of Charles Lhuillier. In 1900, after military service, Dufy won a scholarship to the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he studied under Léon Bonnat and first encountered the work of the Impressionists, particularly Monet and Pissarro, which influenced his early landscapes.

In 1905, Dufy visited the Salon des Indépendants and saw Matisse’s Luxe, Calme et Volupté. This Fauvist painting, with its bold colour and expressive brushwork, transformed his artistic approach. He adopted a bright palette and spontaneous style that conveyed a sense of movement and decorative elegance. His early Fauvist works included landscapes of the Norman coast, but from 1909, his interest shifted towards a more structured composition, influenced by Cézanne.

Dufy’s career expanded beyond painting into textiles, ceramics, and large-scale decorative work. From 1909, he began designing stationery and fabric patterns for the fashion designer Paul Poiret, and by 1912, he was working with the silk firm Bianchini-Férier, producing textiles characterised by fluid lines and motifs drawn from nature and music. His illustrations for books by poets such as Guillaume Apollinaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, and André Gide, as well as his theatre sets, ceramics, and tapestries, further established his reputation as a master of decorative arts.

In the 1920s and 30s, Dufy developed his distinctive style of rapid calligraphic lines over washes of luminous colour, capturing the vitality of regattas at Deauville, horse races at Epsom, orchestras, and views of the Riviera. His most significant work, La Fée Électricité (The Electricity Fairy), completed in 1937 for the Paris International Exposition, measured over 600 square metres and celebrated the history of electricity in a monumental mural, now housed in the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris.

Despite developing severe rheumatoid arthritis in his later years, which affected his ability to paint, Dufy continued working with determination. In 1952, he was awarded the Grand Prize for painting at the 26th International Exhibition of Modern Art, also known as the Venice Biennale. He died on 23 March 1953 in Forcalquier, Provence, and was buried in Cimiez, Nice, near Matisse.

Raoul Dufy’s joyful and elegant vision, infused with bright colour, movement, and a sense of life’s pleasures, remains celebrated worldwide. His works are held in major museums including the Centre Pompidou, MoMA, the Tate, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, continuing to inspire with their enduring spirit of lightness and celebration.