If you've never seen a Raoul Dufy painting, get ready to drool. The Evergreen House, a stately butter-yellow Italianate mansion owned by the Johns Hopkins University and located just down Charles Street near Loyola's campus, recently reinstalled its collection of mouthwateringly gorgeous original Dufy watercolors which had been on hiatus for almost a year.
Dufy's paintings, done in the Fauvist style (from the French word "fauve," meaning "wild animal") depict scenes from the sunny south of France that look more like they were painted with popsicles than with paintbrushes. His colors are so bright and juicy and his strokes so fluid and luscious that you could eat them up. Now you can feast your eyes on them at Evergreen House, where they have made their way back to their rightful place, hanging proudly on the walls of the mansion's master bedroom.
Alice Warder Garrett, a patroness of the arts, and her husband John Work Garrett, a diplomat, bequeathed the 48-room mansion to Johns Hopkins in 1942. Along with it came Alice's entire art collection -- several pieces of which are Dufy watercolors, each one approximately 20" by 25.5".
As the story goes, Alice Garrett commissioned 10 watercolors from the French painter, under the recommendation of her artist-in-residence and confidante, Ignacio Zuloaga. She didn't specify anything other than that they were to be the same size, and she was so pleased with the results that she ordered five more. But Dufy was so late in sending this second shipment that he sent one extra as an apology, bringing Alice's total collection of his work to a grand total of 16 by the year 1939. Not a bad way to say sorry.
The paintings were removed for preservation purposes, during which a paper conservator examined them, and they were found to be in good condition and then re-framed.
Evergreen House curator Jackie O'Regan explains that in order to preserve the Dufy collection so it could continue to be displayed to the public, she proposed a conservation plan that recommended reducing light levels in the master bedroom. This is why only half the collection is on display at one time. The other eight are stored in the dark to preserve them, and the entire collection is rotated once a year.
As a whole, the paintings make a soft, pleasing collection and strike a cool, breezy note on the sea foam-green painted walls from which they hang. They add fluid lines and a splash of color and ripeness that is consistent with the fauve style of Dufy's time.
This French school of painters in the early 20th century worked with brilliant colors in painting vibrant scenes. There is something violent about their extreme colorization technique, yet there is something absolutely decadent and delicious about it at the same time.
After a brief experimentation with cubism in the 1910s, which was not popular with his early collectors and caused them to abandon him, Dufy opened a wood cutting studio in Paris at the behest of a fashion designer who wanted him to experiment with printing on fabric.
It was there, in collaboration with a chemist who wanted to discover new coloring process techniques, that he became greatly intrigued with accentuating color through the use of light. He soon closed his studio and, from then on, resumed painting while traveling over the world, making a name for himself as a premier fauvist painter.
One painting displays the distinctly Mediterranean flavor that the fauves and Dufy were so famous for. It depicts a brilliant royal blue sea and a hillside dotted with white stuccoed, red-roofed houses from the interior of a wide-open, colonnaded drawing room. The shadows cast on the walls are lavender, peach and light blue -- anything but the gray of an actual shadow.
Another standout painting shows the courtyard of a French chateau as seen through a complicated wrought iron gate, embellished with curlicues and twists. Of course, the gate is painted an unlikely bright blue and the house a glowing shade of peach.
In this painting, the light touch of the watercolor medium is especially interesting. Not only does it lend a sparkling lucidity to the brushstrokes, it allows some of Dufy's notations written in pencil, like "Ciel bleu" (blue sky), to show through, a telling memo because only a fauvist like Dufy, quite accustomed to painting bright purple, pink and orange skies, would not take for granted that the sky is blue.
If you're not satisfied with the watercolors, the Evergreen House also counts several Dufy oil paintings in its collection.
One, a still life, is displayed in the drawing room. It features the lovely scene of an empty caf?? table, laden with a loaf of bread, some oil and vinegar, a bowl of pretty pastel pink peaches and a carafe of wine, all sheltered under the a lush green shade. It is an utterly delicious sight.
The other oil painting is displayed in a hallway and depicts a sailing scene, a favorite subject of Dufy's. Sailboats and their billowing sails feature prominently in broad strokes of red, orange, yellow and crisp white. As they sit idling in their deep blue harbor, they shimmer and look like a Ralph Lauren photo shoot with which someone forgot to use the focus lens. It makes you want to dive right in the water and clamber aboard.
From wide open Mediterranean landscapes, to the inviting scene of an empty cafe table, Evergreen's Dufy collection feels like a luxurious vacation full of sunlight and cool, breezy weather.
The Evergreen House is located at 4545 N. Charles St. and can be contacted at (410) 516-0341 and is open Mon.- Fri. from 10 a.m.- 4 p.m. and Sat.- Sun. from 1 - 4 p.m. All tours are guided and begin on the hour. The last one begins at 3 p.m. Admission is free for all Hopkins affiliates presenting an ID.
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