French Fauvist painter Raoul Dufy (1877-1953), with his cheerful watercolors and oils depicting scenes of regattas and horse races, has largely been cast as a painter of luxury and leisure.
This book moves away from the traditional interpretation of Dufy as a painter of pleasurable bourgeois pastimes. While not ignoring the undeniable hedonistic nature of his work, it sets out to show the gradual development of his personal style and his constant pursuit of new artistic expressions, highlighting the more introspective and reflective side of his oeuvre. Dufy was among the early 20th-century artists who did the most to combine the "greater" and "lesser" arts; like Gauguin before him, he made decoration the focus of his artistic concerns and succeeded in giving free rein to his decorative imagination.