The painter who came from the port

Some painters have to go looking for a subject. Raoul Dufy (pronounced “ra-OOL doo-FEE”; 1877–1953) was handed his on the day he was born, because he was born in Le Havre(pronounced “luh AHV-ruh”), the big Norman port that sits where the river Seine empties into the English Channel. Le Havre in 1877 was France’s great transatlantic harbor, a working city of basins and dry docks and warehouses, where the masts of cargo ships and the white sails of yachts crowded the water and the whole town faced the sea. Dufy grew up inside that picture. The harbor, the regattas (the sailing races held offshore on holidays), the rows of signal flags strung up a yacht’s rigging, the sea itself, that was the world he could see from the end of his own street, and it became the thing he painted for the rest of his life.

He came up the way a poor, talented provincial boy came up. He took evening classes at Le Havre’s own School of Fine Arts starting in 1895, won a scholarship to the senior national art school in Paris around 1900 (the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts, the official academy where French painters were trained), and learned to paint the way everyone learned to paint. None of that is what we’re here for. We’re here for one canvas he made back home, in his home port, on a single summer holiday in 1906, when everything he knew how to do collided with something he had just learned how to see.

Here is a small fact that explains a great deal about the painting. The word in its French title is pavoisée (pronounced “pav-wah-ZAY”), which means “decked” or “dressed” with flags. It comes from pavois, the naval term for the long run of signal flags a ship hoists from stem to stern to “dress” itself for a celebration. The word is a sailor’s word, and that is the right pedigree, because Dufy’s love of the flag did not begin in a street at all. It began on the water, in his yacht and regatta pictures, where a boat dressed overall in bright pennants gave him exactly what a painter dreams of: rows of pure, flat color, hung up in the open air, ready to paint. The flag was already doing his work for him out on the harbor before he ever brought it ashore.

So when Le Havre dressed its streets in flags for the national holiday, Dufy was looking at his own favorite subject moved indoors, so to speak, off the water and into the town. La Rue pavoisée(“the street decked with flags”) is a port painter’s picture of his port city on the one day a year it turns itself into a regatta on land. It is a hometown picture, and the home is a harbor, and the flags are the same flags he had been painting on boats all along.