La Terrasse à l'Estaque

La Terrasse à l'Estaque, painted in 1908 and also held at the Musée Cantini, represents another facet of Dufy's sustained engagement with the L'Estaque landscape during his transformative summer there. The terrace subject — a domestic outdoor space from which the bay or landscape is visible — gave Dufy a compositional frame within a frame, the terrace parapet defining a foreground plane against which the distance could be set. This spatial device, familiar from Cézanne's terrace compositions, allowed the painter to address the relationship between near and far without recourse to traditional atmospheric perspective.

Oil on canvas. The terrace structure provides geometric framing for the landscape behind, a device that concentrates spatial complexity in the relationship between the near architectural elements and the more abstract distance. Dufy's brushwork follows a relatively systematic handling of parallel strokes derived from Cézanne.