La dame en rose

La dame en rose, painted in 1906 and held at the Museum of Grenoble, belongs to Raoul Dufy's Fauve period, when he was responding energetically to the color intensity of Matisse and the chromatic liberation on display at the 1905 Salon d'Automne. The standing female figure in a pink dress is rendered with the kind of bold color simplification that characterized the Fauve approach: form is subordinated to the expressive force of pure hue. Within a decade Dufy would develop the lighter, more decorative idiom for which he became famous, but here the influence of Fauvism is still primary.

The figure's pink dress is painted in areas of near-flat color with minimal internal modeling, the form suggested mainly through silhouette and simplified contour. Surrounding tones of green and ochre create chromatic contrast rather than atmospheric depth, following the Fauve principle that color relationship carries the full burden of pictorial expression.