Yachts in the Port of Deauville (Yachts dans le Port de Deauville)

Painted in 1938 and held at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, this harbor scene depicts the yachts and sailing vessels that were among Dufy's favorite recurring subjects. Deauville, the fashionable Normandy resort town, provided him with the combination of maritime activity and leisure-class sociality that he depicted throughout his career. Regatta and harbor scenes were central to his mature vocabulary, and by 1938 he had refined the formula to its most elegant and efficient expression: transparent color, swift drawing, abundant flags and rigging.

The composition is organized around the forest of masts, sails, and pennants that fill the upper portion of the canvas, with the reflective harbor surface below. Dufy's characteristic technique—drawing in blue or black line over which washes of related colors float—gives the yachts their festive, weightless quality, the flags adding splashes of red and yellow against the dominant blue-white tonality.