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Overview
Raoul Dufy (1877–1953) was a French Fauvist painter. He developed a colorful, decorative style that became fashionable for designs of ceramics and textiles, as well as decorative schemes for public buildings. He is noted for scenes of open-air social events, and his rapidly 'drawn' style was ideal for conveying pleasures in life, the seaside, the casino, the race-track. He was also a draftsman, printmaker (known particularly for his lithographs), book illustrator, scenic designer, a designer of furniture, and a planner of public spaces. Dufy is a delightful reminder that modernism need not always be about the transcendant, the difficult, the abstract or indeed the subversive. The weather is always fine in Dufy, the sea a deep blue. A delightful, intense colourist, never losing sight of the figurative, he appealed greatly to Frances Hodgkins in the 1920s as her art moved down a modernist path.
Dufy made several lithographs depicting bathers in the 1920s. This one is also known as Troi Baigneuses devant le port de Sainte-Adresse; Sainte-Adresse is a resort close to the port of Le Havre on the Normandy coast and was a famous locale for Claude Monet 40-50 years earlier. Dufy himself was a local. The bathers have a quick-sketch quality and are close, both in style and mood, to the figures of Henri Matisse, Dufy's fellow Fauve.
See: Wikipedia, 'Raoul Dufy', https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raoul_Dufy
Dr Mark Stocker Curator, Historical International Art August 2018