There is a lightness to this watercolour that feels entirely intentional — a quality of air and transparency that oil paint cannot quite achieve and that Jean Dufy understood completely. Bord de Rivière, dated 1926, shows a French country house beside a river, a small boat with two figures in the foreground, the gate of a neighbouring property just visible to the right, the whole scene dissolving at its edges into the white of the paper as though the afternoon itself is fading at the margins. The technique is masterful. The architectural elements — the slate-roofed house with its pointed turret, the gate pillars with their stone urns, the garden wall — are drawn in blue and red ink with a calligraphic confidence that gives the composition its structure, its lines rapid and sure. Over and around this drawn framework the watercolour washes are laid in broad, overlapping planes: the warm ochre and gold of the trees, the cooler blues of the building and water, the fresh greens of the riverbank vegetation. Where the washes overlap they create soft, unexpected harmonies. Where the paper shows through, it breathes. The two figures in the boat — indicated in a few strokes of blue ink, one leaning forward to row — are typical of Dufy's economy with the human figure: just enough to animate the scene, no more. The whole canvas has the quality of something seen and set down in the same moment, which is precisely what the best watercolours are. This work is accompanied by a certificate from Jacques Bailly, the leading authority on Jean Dufy's output, and will be included in the updated catalogue raisonné under reference number 4946. It comes from a private French collection — the closest provenance to the painter's own world. Born in Le Havre in 1888, the younger brother of Raoul, 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.