Footnotes

The authenticity of this work has been confirmed by Fanny Guillon-Laffaille.

Provenance
Maurice Goldman Collection, London.
Aubrey & Betty Lynes Collection, UK (a gift from the above in December 1991).
Private collection, UK (by descent from the above).


'Blue. Incandescent, phosphorescent, and ever evanescent blues. Of all the imagery suggested by the mere mention of his name, perhaps blue is most nearly synonymous with Raoul Dufy'
(J. Lancaster, Raoul Dufy, Washington, 1983, p. 5).

On the sun-drenched sands of Deauville, amid the salt-tinged breeze, the signal flags and the tasteful hubbub of the promenade, Raoul Dufy found a singular subject that fused his two great obsessions – colour and movement. For Dufy, the regatta was not merely a topical scene of leisure; it was an arena in which pictorial problems could be solved in real time. Régates à Deauville (1935), painted at the apex of his career, is therefore both spectacle and experiment: a fleet of hulls, masts and sails reduced to an orchestration of rhythmical marks, colour chords and lyrical line.

Dufy's handling in this picture is immediate and musical. The sails are not inert shapes but active registers - spinnaker and mainsail simplified into swathes of white and pearl that read like cymbals struck in a composition. Loose, calligraphic lines describe wind currents and rippling waves, while long vertical brushstrokes on the masts subtly suggest the invisible pull of the breeze on rigging and canvas. The painting breathes with the artist's famed sténographie technique – a shorthand of drawing allied to translucent colour washes – where several assured strokes will suggest a hull cutting through the wake or a boom that glints with reflected sun. This economy of means confers velocity – tacking, bearing away, the brief squall of spray – and invites the viewer to feel the motion as if standing on the deck.

Colour in Dufy's regatta pictures is at once descriptive and metaphysical. The canvas is dominated by saturated blues – ultramarine, turquoise and sky – while the sea answers in cooler, more variegated tones of mauve, teal and sea-green. A vertical band of sunlit yellow on the right acts as a reflected beam down the water, marking the winding down of a warm summer afternoon. This preoccupation with chromatic consequence stems from a turning point in 1926, when Dufy observed a child playing on the quay at Honfleur and wrote that colour struck the eye before form – a revelation that prompted him to liberate line from colour and to superimpose lively inklike drawing over broad, luminous planes. The result in Régates à Deauville forms a composed event in hue and rhythm – the palette as score, the marks as tempo.

The present work sits in direct continuity with the artist's notable marina paintings, such as Deauville, Drying the Sails (1933, Tate Museum) – a contemporaneous, larger-scale meditation in which the blues are intensified and the boats surge forward across the plane in a manner that heightens the sensation of approach and return. In both pictures Dufy balances expressive freedom with compositional control: the buoyant spontaneity of chalk-fast line, the steadying geometry of hulls and masts, and the structural horizon that anchors the flotilla as it makes for harbour.

Dufy's regatta motif belongs to a lineage of artists fascinated by the spectacle of sail, yet his interpretation transforms inherited models into something singular. Compare Claude Monet's Régates à Argenteuil (circa 1872, Musée d'Orsay) – a study of ephemeral atmospheric conditions where the broken brushstroke renders the shimmering interplay of light on water – with Dufy's approach, which abstracts and arranges for decorative and rhythmic effect rather than literal transcription. While Monet's canvases dwelled on transience and reflected light; Dufy composed with chromatic architecture, organising the sea's vibration into patterned bands and calligraphies.

Further back in time, Canaletto's panoramic spectacle A Regatta on the Grand Canal (circa 1740, National Gallery, London) celebrates pageantry and civic theatre with painstaking perspective and crowd detail. Canaletto records the gondolas, the palazzi and the procession – the regatta as urban ritual. Dufy, by contrast, is less interested in topography than in the choreography of sail and wind – the regatta rendered as lyrical shorthand rather than civic catalogue. Both artists, however, share an appetite for spectacle and the pictorial staging of public leisure.

The chromatic daring of the Fauves also bears directly on Dufy's method. Henri Matisse's Luxe, Calme et Volupté (1904, Musée d'Orsay) introduced a liberated tapestry of colour and encouraged a younger generation to treat paint as autonomous sensation. Dufy encountered the work at the Salon des Indépendants in 1905 and was swiftly converted to Fauvism. Paul Signac's pointillist regattas, meanwhile, demonstrate a scientific curiosity about optical mixture and decorative surface. Dufy met and exhibited alongside these artists, absorbing the Fauvist licence for saturated, non-naturalistic colour even as he developed a more graphic draughtsmanship and an affection for convivial subjects – yachts, pennants and promenaders. The resultant synthesis places him between the decorative force of Matisse and the chromatic rigour of Signac, yet resolutely his own.

Biographically, the sea was part of Dufy's early grammar. Born in Le Havre and raised within sight of the estuary, he matured amid tidal movement and the visual theatre of harbour life – hulls and keels, flags and rigging left indelible impressions. Later, as he painted in coastal nodes from Cowes to Deauville and Le Havre, the regatta became an enduring vocabulary that allowed him to engage modern life's leisured display - the flotilla of pleasure craft, the race committee's flags, the returning yachts steaming gently toward moorings – while always returning the scene to pure pictorial sensation. His works from the 1930s, the apex of his public recognition, showcase the intimate accordion of paint and line that made his regattas sing.

Ultimately, Régates à Deauville is less a document than a choreography – an evocation of wind in the sheets, of hulls cleaving the tide, of crews easing the sails to catch a gust – each rendered with a virtuoso economy. It invites the viewer aboard, to feel the heel and the wake, to notice the fluttering burgee and the mirrored light along the keel. The work stands as a consummate example of Dufy's ability to teach colour to sing and the sea to dance upon the canvas – a joyous, modern testament to the pleasures of sailing and to the painterly possibilities of the regatta.