Arcades à l'Estaque

Arcades à l'Estaque, painted in 1908 and held at the Musée Cantini, shows Dufy responding to the architectural structures of the L'Estaque town — its arched passages and domestic buildings — with the same geometric simplification he applied to its landscapes. The arcade subject gave Dufy repeated vertical and semicircular motifs to work with, the rhythm of arches providing a structural armature that Cézanne's post-impressionist geometry had taught him to value. This treatment of architecture as interlocking formal elements rather than topographic record anticipates the decorative linearism that would become Dufy's signature in later decades.

Oil on canvas. The arcade's repeated arches provide a compositional grid of vertical and curved elements. Dufy simplifies mortar lines and surface variation into flat colour areas, treating architecture as a formal problem of shape relationships rather than a documentary subject.