L'Estaque

L'Estaque from 1908, now at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, is among the clearest demonstrations of Dufy's engagement with Cézanne's Bay of L'Estaque compositions — the rooftop panorama looking down toward the water that the older painter had made iconic. By working the same motif, Dufy enters into explicit dialogue with his predecessor, accepting the structural lessons while inflecting them with his own emerging colour sensibility. The RISD Museum's collection, strong in European modernism, preserves this work in the context of its wider holdings of early twentieth-century French painting.

Oil on canvas. The panoramic view from above organises the composition into horizontal colour bands — rooftops, sea, sky — with the town's geometric mass in the middle distance. Dufy's handling follows post-Cézannian practice of rendering distance through chromatic rather than tonal progression.