Nature morte à la tour blanche

Nature morte à la tour blanche, at the Musée Hyacinthe-Rigaud in Perpignan, is one of Dufy's still lifes from around 1930 in which a small white tower — perhaps an architectural model or a decorative object — appears among the domestic objects on a table. Dufy's still lifes occupy a curious position in his output: more intimate than his public spectacle paintings, they reveal his debt to Cézanne's structural approach to the table-top arrangement while remaining distinctively playful in their handling. The white tower provides a geometric anchor for the composition's chromatic warmth.

Dufy organises the still life around the white tower form, whose geometric simplicity contrasts with the more organic objects surrounding it. His handling in still life tends toward slightly more deliberate construction than his landscape or crowd scenes, the colour washes more carefully bounded, the drawn line more descriptively attentive to individual object character.