Private Collection, Brussels

Painted in 1910, this work is a wonderful example from the height of Raoul Dufy’s ‘Cezannesque’ period. Working alongside Picasso and Braque, Dufy was at the forefront of the development of the new pictorial language of Cubism, and like many of his contemporaries, looked to Cezanne as his inspiration; “We have the tree, the bench, the house, but what interests me, the most difficult thing is what surrounds these objects. How do we hold everything together? Nobody has done it like Cezanne” (quoted in D. Perez-Tibi, Dufy, New York, 1989, pp.40-41).  

Underlying this interest in the relationship between objects was an appreciationඣ of the volumetric conception of space that Cezanne had imparted. This work shows Dufy replicating these techniques; the masts of the boats and simple planes of the houses succeed in evoking a sense of volume operating in a compositional space, and the pr🦄ecise hatching of his brushwork creates an orderly, structured reality quite unlike the vibrant and chaotic compositions of his Fauvist period. The success of this painting as a composition is Dufy’s ability to take Cezanne forward into a new age of colorist expression.