Art: Matisse's Dufy

Matisse's Duty

Three dates, each five years apart, are epochal in the life of Raoul Dufy. In 1895, one of nine children of a bourgeois family in Havre, he first began to paint as relaxation from clerking in an importing firm. In 1900 he went to Paris, studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts under pompous Père Léon Joseph Bonnat. In 1905, he saw for the first time Henri Matisse's canvas Luxe, calme et volupté. "Confronted by that picture," he said, "I understood all the new reasons for painting." He immediately joined the famed Matisse...

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