Throughout the 1920s and 30s Dufy created an impressive series of paintings and watercolours centred around the river Marne on the eastern outskirts of Paris. An escape from chaos of the city, the area was a favoured subject for a number of artists from the end of the 19th and into the 20th century including Marquet, Cézanne and Pissarro.

Dufy is famed for works such as ‘Nogent-sur-Marne’ which depict people enjoying their leisure time. Rowers first began to feature in Dufy’s work in 1919, but it was several years later that he began to paint them on the Marne, focusing, as seen here, on the figures in front of the boathouse. At the time of painting the present watercolour, Dufy was at the peak of his powers, both in terms of the development of his own visual identity and its critical reception. He was celebrated for encapsulating the joie de vivre, in a palette of intense vivacious colour.

Dufy’s Marne paintings are now in many of the most important international institutions such as The Phillips Collection, Washington (‘La Marne’, 1938), Centre du Pompidou, Paris (‘La Marne à Nogent’, c.1925) and Museé d’art moderne, Paris (‘Bords de Marne, les canotiers’, 1925).

‘Nogent-sur-Marne’ was first owned by the Belgian author and artist Émile Van Gindertael who went by the pseudonym Jean Milo. He lent the gouache to an important exhibition of Dufy’s work at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels in 1943.