"Blue is the only color which maintains its own character in all its tones.", Raoul Dufy
Raoul Dufy (June 3, 1877 – March 23, 1953) was a French painter, draftsman, printmaker, illustrator, and textile designer, and one of the leading colorists of twentieth-century European modernism. Born in Le Havre, the second of eleven children of an accountant and amateur musician, he left school at fourteen to work for a coffee-importing firm and began evening classes at the Le Havre École des Beaux-Arts under Charles Lhuillier, a former pupil of Ingres. In 1900 he won a scholarship to the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and his decisive turn toward Fauvism came in 1905, when he saw Henri Matisse's Luxe, calme et volupté at the Salon des Indépendants.
Through the next decade he passed through Fauvism, the influence of Cézanne, and a brief Cubist phase before arriving by 1920 at the distinctive idiom for which he is now best known: a thin, rapid wash of bright color laid over an underlying drawing of buildings, boats, figures, and horses, depicting yachting and racing scenes, the Riviera, music and the orchestra, and the contemporary leisure life of interwar Europe. From 1911 to 1933 he also worked as a textile designer for the Lyon silk house Bianchini-Férier and for the couturier Paul Poiret, producing some three thousand designs that translated his painted vocabulary into commercial fabric. His monumental La Fée Électricité (1937), painted for the Paris International Exposition's Pavillon de l'Électricité et de la Lumière and now installed at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, was at the time of its making one of the largest paintings in the world. His paintings, watercolors, prints, and textile designs are held in essentially every major collection of twentieth-century European art, including the Centre Pompidou, the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Tate, and the Museum of Modern Art.