The Window by Raoul Dufy

The Window - Raoul Dufy - Oil Painting Wall Decor

Product Overview

Upgrade your walls with The Window - Raoul Dufy - Oil Painting Wall Decor. Every fine art reproduction is painted entirely by hand, so the surface carries the depth and variation of an original oil painting rather than the flatness of a digital canvas print.

The Story Behind the Painting

Saint-Adresse, 1923
Oil on canvas
36 1/4 x 28 3/4 in. (92 x 73 cm.)

In April 1920 Raoul Dufy signed a contract with Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, which in the following year gave the artist his first one-man show, comprised of 57 paintings and 30 watercolors, pastels and drawings. The success of this exhibition led to another one in 1922. His work designing textiles for the Maison Bianchini-Férier kept him in Paris part of the year, but at other times Dufy now had the financial security to travel extensively. Since 1919 he divided his time between Vence in the Midi, and Saint-Adresse near Le Havre on the coast of the English Channel, where he had grown up as a child and painted extensively during his association with Fauvism. In the latter part of 1922 he toured Italy, with an extended stay in Sicily that ended in the spring of the following year.

These travels made Dufy keenly aware of local variations in light and the possibilities of color. He developed his ideas of couleur-lumière: "Light is the soul of color, without light, color is lifeless" (quoted in D. Perez-Tibi, Dufy, New York, 1989, p. 134). He also began to adapt the methods he used in wood engraving and designing fabrics to his painting. Line and color each retained their particular autonomy, but were allowed to act in concert, creating a dynamic, lively and detailed surface that resonated with intense and vibrant color. As he had done in his fabric designs, he allowed color to bleed past the outlines of forms. He was accustomed to printing on his fabrics different bands of unmodulated color, which he used to create a basic design that was flat overall, but in their tonal contrasts projected the illusion of depth. He discovered that the same ideas could be applied to his paintings, and in the many watercolors and oil paintings he executed during his travels and back in the studio in the early 1920s he quickly perfected these techniques.

The present painting features the silvery northern light of the Channel at Saint-Adresse. The artist, looking out the window of his hotel room and over the balcony grillwork, has caught sight of fishermen gathering shellfish along the water's edge at low tide. Here Dufy adopts a compositional device favored by various post-Impressionist and Fauve painters, using the sides of the open window to frame the seascape, and exploiting the spatial tension between the interior in the foreground and the view in the distance. In this format the foreground actually extends vertically along the sides of the seascape, which emphasizes the flat, zonal structure of Dufy's composition. He then brings the surface to life by contrasting the drawn elements in each of these compositional bands: the triangular forms of the wavecrests, the rectangular shapes of the shutter slats and window panes, and the curving arabesques in the balcony railing.

The window as frame occurs frequently in Dufy's works of this period, as it had in many of the still-lifes Picasso painted in Saint-Rapha?l and Paris in 1919 and 1920. In view of Dufy's movements during this period, traveling from place to place and rarely staying in the same hotel room for very long, it becomes a significant metaphor as well as a spatial device. The window reflects the tension between the introspective and subjective interior world of the artist and the outer objective world to which he is perpetually drawn.

Collectors often choose this fine art image when searching for fine art oil painting that feels substantial rather than decorative or disposable.

Materials & Craftsmanship

Each canvas is painted entirely by hand with professional oil paints on artist-grade cotton canvas. No printing, giclée, or digital imaging is used at any stage, so the surface keeps the slight relief and color variation of real brushwork.

What Is Included

• Painted entirely by hand in oils on artist-grade canvas, with no giclée or inkjet process involved.
• A generous 2-inch blank canvas border surrounds the image to simplify mounting.
• Direct-from-studio worldwide delivery with no third-party resellers.
• Available canvas sizes for this hand painted oil painting: 20 X 24 in, 24 X 36 in, 30 X 40 in, 36 X 48 in, 48 X 72 in.
• Any size you need can be produced — just tell us your preferred dimensions.
• Choose from DHL, UPS, FedEx, USPS and other competitively priced carriers.
• Free canvas stretching on wooden stretcher bars; custom framing available on request.
• Before dispatch we email a digital proof so you can approve the finished canvas.

Where to Hang It

This fine art oil painting wall decor is equally at home in a residence, a boutique hotel, or a professional office. Its fauvist character makes it a safe, distinctive gift for anyone furnishing a gallery wall.

Shipping & Guarantee

In short: The Window - Raoul Dufy - Oil Painting Wall Decor combines a fauvist composition, a 100% hand painted oil painting process, and the flexibility of made-to-order canvas sizes — a dependable choice for fine art oil painting and gallery wall art.