Paysage aux trois meules de paille

Painted in 1910 and held at the Strasbourg Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, this Fauvist-influenced landscape depicting haystacks in a field shows Dufy at a pivotal point in his stylistic development. Under the influence of Cézanne's posthumous retrospective in 1907 and Braque's emerging Cubism, Dufy temporarily moved toward a more structured, geometrically organized approach to landscape before finding his mature synthesis. The three haystacks echo Monet's famous haystack series while showing Dufy's attempt to give landscape a more architectural, volumetric character.

The three haystacks are organized as distinct geometric forms within a horizontally banded landscape, with sky, field, and foliage each occupying a clearly defined zone. Dufy's brushwork in this transitional period is more directional and structural than his later work, building the haystacks' forms through cross-hatched, Cézannesque strokes.