Olive Trees by the Golfe Juan

Catalogue entry

Raoul Dufy 1877-1953

N04850 Oliviers au Golfe Juan (Olive Trees by the Golfe Juan) c.1927

Inscribed 'Raoul Dufy' b.r.
Watercolour on paper, 20 x 26 (50.5 x 66)
Presented by the Contemporary Art Society 1936
Prov: With St George's Gallery, London (purchased in Paris); Miss A.F. Brown, London, 1928; CAS 1936
Exh: French Water-Colours, St George's Gallery, London, October 1928 (26) as 'Oliviers au Golfe Juan'; Acquisitions of the CAS, Tate Gallery, September-October 1946 (102a)
Repr: John Russell, From Sickert to 1948 (London 1948), pl.42; Alfred Werner, Raoul Dufy (London 1970), p.28

When Dufy was shown a photograph of this work in 1951, he inscribed it on the back 'Environs de Vallauris | Alpes Maritimes | vers 1927' (near Vallauris, Alpes Maritimes, about 1927). Vallauris is situated on a hill about a mile and a half from the Golfe Juan.

Maurice Laffaille in the second volume of his catalogue raisonné, Raoul Dufy (Geneva 1973), lists and reproduces eight oil paintings of the Golfe Juan (Nos.474-82), all said to have been painted in 1927, and seven of Vallauris (Nos.483-9): four as painted in 1927 and one each as painted in 1926, 1928 and 1929. However none of these shows quite the same view as this watercolour. He adds (in a letter of 3 October 1975) that there are also at least ten other watercolours of the region of the Golfe Juan, all dating between 1923 and 1927.

Published in:
Ronald Alley, Catalogue of the Tate Gallery's Collection of Modern Art other than Works by British Artists, Tate Gallery and Sotheby Parke-Bernet, London 1981, p.195, reproduced p.195

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