L'apéritif

L'apéritif, painted in 1908 and held at the Musée d'Art Moderne, is among the few explicitly figural works from Dufy's L'Estaque summer, depicting the social ritual of the pre-dinner drink in a Mediterranean outdoor setting. The apéritif — a firmly established French social ceremony — gave Dufy a figurative subject within the same landscape he was treating abstractly elsewhere. The contrast between the social warmth of the subject and the formal rigour of his post-Cézannian approach is characteristic of the moment when French painters were simultaneously absorbing structural lessons and retaining their traditional attachment to observed life.

Oil on canvas. Figure and outdoor setting are given equal compositional weight, consistent with Dufy's Cézannian approach in which the structural organisation of colour planes takes precedence over narrative emphasis. The palette includes the warm ochres of Provençal afternoon light.