“Bateaux des Pecheurs – Honfleur”

Honfleur has been painted by almost every significant French artist since Boudin set up his easel on the quayside in the 1850s. Monet grew up there. Courbet painted it. Jongkind, Sisley, Pissarro — all of them came. By the time Jean Dufy arrived in 1946 the harbour was one of the most painted subjects in French art, which makes what he does with it all the more remarkable. This is not a painting of Honfleur as anyone had seen it before. The palette is electric. The harbour water is an intense flat turquoise — not the grey-green of the Norman estuary but something closer to the Mediterranean, pushed to a register that has no interest in meteorological accuracy and every interest in visual exhilaration. Against it the fishing boats are rendered in rapid calligraphic strokes — masts indicated with a single line, hulls suggested rather than described, the rigging a web of dark marks laid over the luminous ground with complete confidence. The buildings behind the quay are handled with the same freedom: yellow, white, blue and pink, their architectural details dissolved into colour and mark. 1946 is a significant date. Paris had been liberated two years earlier, and there is something in the mood of this canvas — the brightness of the colour, the energy of the handling, the sense of joy in the act of painting — that belongs to that particular moment of release. Dufy was fifty-eight and at the height of his powers. The provenance of this work is exceptional. It passed through the collections of the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Phoenix Art Museum before entering the private collection of Alvin H. Haas, and was subsequently handled by Findlay Galleries in Chicago — one of the most respected dealers in French modern art in the United States. A painting with this history has been seen, assessed and valued by some of the most discerning eyes in the American museum world. Born in Le Havre in 1888 — just along the Normandy coast from Honfleur — Jean Dufy spent his career in Paris among a circle that included Braque, Picasso and Apollinaire. His work is held in the Musée National d'Art Moderne at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Albertina in Vienna.