The Red Mosque

Painted in 1909 and held at the Strasbourg Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, this canvas depicting a red mosque marks Dufy's engagement with North African subjects following his trip to Morocco in 1906. Like Delacroix and Matisse before him, Dufy found in North Africa a saturated world of color, pattern, and light that confirmed and intensified his own chromatic instincts. The red mosque—its warm terracotta mass set against blue sky or green vegetation—gave him a subject of pure color contrast that aligned perfectly with his developing mature language.

The mosque's deep red mass dominates the composition, its warm earth tones contrasting with the cooler blues and greens of sky and surrounding vegetation. Dufy applies paint with his characteristic directness, building the color in opaque, juicy strokes that give the architectural form both solidity and luminous intensity.