Trois Roses – original design for Bianchini-Férier (1917)

The French Fauvist painter, draftsman, and printmaker Raoul Dufy inspired a wide range of fine and decorative artists with his playful style and judicious choice of subject. Dufy drew inspiration from Impressionists Camille Pissarro and Claude Monet and closely studied the works of Paul Cézanne and Henri Matisse. He typically painted leisure scenes, seascapes (often of the French Riviera), and domestic interiors, as in Artist’s Studio in Venice, a vibrant red scene recalling Matisse’s own rendition of the same subject. After 1920, Dufy engaged more closely with the work of Pablo Picasso flattening and deconstructing his compositions. Dufy was also hugely influential as a commercial illustrator, many of his works being included in books by Guillaume Apollinaire and Stéphane Mallarmé.

*Bianchini-Férier is the longest continuously running silk mill in Europe. Founded in 1888, the firm specialised in jacquard-woven dress and furnishing silks, and became renowned for its fine silk velvets and silk-and-metal brocades for haute couture in the early 1900s.