“Promenade au Bois de Boulogne”

The Bois de Boulogne on a fine afternoon — riders on horseback, a white carriage and pair moving at a smart trot, promenaders on foot, the great Haussmann apartment blocks glimpsed through the trees behind. It is one of the defining scenes of Parisian bourgeois life, and Jean Dufy painted it with the affection and fluency of someone who knew it intimately. What is immediately striking is the colour. The palette here is predominantly blue — the trees, the sky, the horses, even the shadows on the ground are all pulled into the same cool, luminous register, with only the brown of the foreground rider, the red of a coat and the warm ochre of the building facade providing contrast. It is a bold and entirely deliberate choice: not the Bois de Boulogne as it appears on any particular afternoon but as it exists in the imagination — elegant, timeless, saturated with the particular blue of a Parisian day remembered at its best. The handling is characteristic of Dufy at his most assured. The white horses drawing the carriage are indicated in a handful of rapid strokes, their movement conveyed through the angle of the marks rather than anatomical description. The figures on horseback to the left are similarly economical — dark shapes against the luminous ground, their identity as riders established by silhouette alone. The trees are a tangle of calligraphic marks, blue on blue, their branches drawn with the same rapid confidence as the rigging in his harbour paintings. This work is documented in the catalogue raisonné of Jean Dufy by Jacques Bailly, Volume II, No. B.1955, published Paris, 2010 — the definitive scholarly record of his output. Its provenance traces a distinguished international journey: from Abels Galerie in Cologne to a private collection in Ibiza, then to Galerie Jacques Bailly in Paris — the gallery responsible for the catalogue raisonné itself — before entering a private American collection. 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.