Honfleur's old harbour is one of the great subjects of French painting — Boudin painted it obsessively, Monet grew up in its shadow, Courbet and Jongkind both came. Jean Dufy came too, and painted it entirely on his own terms. Where earlier painters had responded to the picturesque timber-framed quayside with careful observation, Dufy responded with pure colour and absolute freedom. The composition here is bold and unconventional. The foreground is occupied not by water or boats but by the green expanse of the quayside itself — deckchairs in red and white scattered across it, a small sailing dinghy with a yellow sail tipped on its side, the whole scene rendered with the casual energy of a painter completely at ease with his subject. The buildings behind the quay are handled with characteristic directness: the famous yellow house of the old town, the pink and blue facades of the Lieutenance quarter, their windows and architectural details set down as rapid dark marks against flat planes of colour. Masts rise into a flat blue sky, their rigging indicated in a few confident strokes. The palette is the thing. Dufy is not interested in the grey Atlantic light of the Norman coast as it actually is — he is interested in colour as sensation, in the experience of a bright day on a harbour quayside rendered at full chromatic intensity. The red of the deckchair against the green of the quay, the yellow of the sail, the blue of the sky — each relationship is exact and purposeful. The provenance of this work mirrors that of its companion piece. 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. Two museum collections and a named private collection of this distinction represent an exceptional ownership history for any work on the market. Jean Dufy (1888–1964) was born in Le Havre and 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.