Trees in L'Estaque

Trees in L'Estaque, painted in 1908 and now in the Musée Cantini's collection, treats the Mediterranean pine and scrub vegetation around L'Estaque as pure formal material — masses of green negotiated against sky blue and earth ochre. Trees had been one of Cézanne's central compositional preoccupations, their branching forms providing structural armatures for colour analysis, and Dufy engages with this inheritance while moving toward his own more decorative resolution. The Cantini's holdings of multiple 1908 Dufy works make it the primary institutional record of this pivotal moment in his development.

Oil on canvas. Tree forms are rendered as interlocking colour masses rather than descriptively branched structures. The trunks provide vertical elements against the horizontal organisation of ground and sky, a compositional dynamic Dufy exploits with deliberate structural intent.