Dufy was one of those artists who seemed genuinely determined to find pleasure in modern life and paint it before it disappeared. Regattas, race meetings, orchestras, beaches, flowers, restaurants and crowded interiors all appear in his work with this extraordinary sense of movement and speed. Even now, the paintings still feel fresh, spontaneous and full of life.

Born in Le Havre into a large working-class family, Dufy began by attending evening art classes before eventually winning a scholarship to study in Paris. Seeing the Fauves at the Salon d’Automne in 1905 completely changed the direction of his work. Matisse’s use of colour, in particular, appears to have unlocked something for him, pushing Dufy away from the softer Impressionist style of his early years towards the bright, decorative palette that became unmistakably his own.

Alongside painting, he also became one of the most important textile designers of the early twentieth century, producing fabrics for the Lyon silk company Bianchini Férier from around 1912 onwards. His designs helped shape modern French interiors and fashion before the First World War and still feel remarkably contemporary today.

In 1937 Dufy completed La Fée Electricité for the Paris Exposition Internationale, a vast decorative mural celebrating the history and promise of electricity. Spanning more than six hundred square metres, it remains one of the largest paintings ever made. Installed today at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, it still feels remarkably bold and optimistic, full of the same energy and movement that runs through the rest of his work.

Printmaking remained central to Dufy throughout his career. At the Mourlot atelier in Paris, master printers translated his watercolours and drawings into lithographs, pochoirs and posters while somehow preserving the looseness, colour and speed that made his paintings so distinctive in the first place. That sense of movement never really left his work, which is why Dufy’s prints and posters still carry the same pleasure and energy as the life he spent painting