The French painter was born in Havre in 1877.
Dufy was a painter of joy, the joy of seeing, imagining and creating, without ever repudiating the reality of the world around us.
From the visible world he chose a few themes which pleased him, and he made successive variations of them up to the time of his death. Picking out the precise details, on a palm tree, the hull of a ship, a violin bow, these elements became his trademark.
Dufy's variations give one another value. They are the 'states of soul' of a particularly receptive painter, who started seeking afresh in every picture. He put infinite imagination and cunning into his drawings, using the whites of his paper with unequalled skill and knowledge.
He was never satisfied with what he knew. Up to the last he could be seen throwing himself with extraordinary youthfulness into the quest for the new ways of expression. For instance, he tried to convey, by using black, the effect of being dazzled by looking straight into the sun.
Dufy did not give a thought to fame, at the end of his life he was overwhelmed by the indications of his triumph that came to him from practically all over the world. He lived to see the great retrospective exhibition of his works held in Geneva.
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