The Artist's Studio

The Artist's Studio, at the Phillips Collection in Washington, is one of Dufy's studio interior paintings from around 1935 — a subject with a long history in European art from Velázquez to Courbet and beyond. Dufy's studios in various Paris locations provided the settings for these self-reflective images, in which the painter turned the conventional artist's studio subject into an occasion for his characteristic chromatic warmth and graphic playfulness. The Phillips Collection, with its distinguished holding of French modernist work, provides an appropriate institutional home for this self-reflective image.

Dufy populates the studio with the accumulation of an artist's working environment — canvases, objects, studio furniture — rendered through his characteristic wash-and-line technique. The interior space is handled with more careful attention to volumetric organization than his landscape and crowd subjects, the studio objects providing opportunities for varied texture and material description within his overall light-filled manner.