Jim and Howard's Artwork:

The following pieces have not been spoken for.  Please let me know if you are interested.  (Click on thumbnail to see a larger picture).

 I)  French Harbor and Lighthouse (undated and not titled), s/ Raoul Dufy, Pen and Ink Drawing

Raoul Dufy (June 3, 1877 – March 23, 1953) was a French Fauvist painter. He developed a colourful, decorative style that became fashionable for designs for ceramics, textiles and decorative schemes for public buildings. He is noted for scenes of open-air social events.  Dufy was born at Le Havre, in Normandy, one of a family of nine members. He left school at the age of 14 to work in a coffee importing company. In 1895 when he was 18, he started evening classes in art at Le Havre École des Beaux-Arts. He and Othon Friesz, a school friend, studied the works of Eugène Boudin in the museum in Le Havre 

In 1900, after a year of military service, Raoul won a scholarship enabling him to attend the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he was a fellow student with Georges Braque. The impressionist landscapists, such as Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro, influenced him.

Introduced to Berthe Weill in 1902, she showed his work in her gallery. Henri Matisse's Luxe, Calme et Volupté, which Dufy saw at the Salon des Indépendants in 1905, was a revelation to the young artist and directed his interest towards Fauvism. Les Fauves (wild beasts) emphasised bright colour and rich bold contours in their work, and Dufy’s painting reflects this approach until about 1909, when contact with the work of Paul Cézanne led him to adopt a somewhat subtler technique. It was not until 1920, after he had flirted briefly with yet another style, cubism, that Dufy developed his own distinctive approach involving skeletal structures, arranged in a diminished perspective, and the use of light washes of colour put on by swift brush strokes in a manner that came to be known as stenographic.

Dufy's cheerful oils and watercolours depict yachting scenes, sparkling views of the French Riviera, chic parties and musical events. The optimistic and fashionably decorative and illustrative nature of much of his work has meant that his output is less highly critically valued than artists who treat a wider range of social concerns.

In 1938, Dufy completed one of the largest paintings ever done, a huge and immensely popular epic to electricity, the fresco La Fée Electricité for the Exposition Internationale in Paris.

J)  1964  Children in Gardens (1964), Moya Dyring, Oil on Canvas

DYRING, MOYA CLAIRE (1909-1967), artist, was born on 10 February 1909 at Coburg, Melbourne, third child of Carl Peter Wilhelm Dyring, medical practitioner, and his second wife Dagmar Alexandra Esther, née Cohn, both Victorian born. Moya was educated (1917-27) at Firbank Church of England Girls' Grammar School, Brighton. After visiting Paris in 1928, she studied (1929-32) at the National Gallery schools, Melbourne, and shared fellow student Sam Atyeo's interest in artistic innovation.

Classical modernism engaged her attention in the early 1930s. She painted at the George Bell school and studied under Rah Fizelle in Sydney; Mary Alice Evatt and Cynthia Reed were her colleagues. For several months in 1937 she took charge of Heide, the home and garden of John and Sunday Reed, at Bulleen, Melbourne. The Reeds were pivotal both to her sympathy for modernism and her belief in congenial fellowship. She enjoyed something of the intense relationship with Sunday Reed that the latter would subsequently extend to Joy Hester. In June Dyring held an exhibition, opened by H. V. Evatt, at the Riddell Gallery, Melbourne. Less enthusiastic than the Reeds and the Evatts about her art, Basil Burdett wrote of her 'somewhat incoherent interpretation of modern ideas', although he did acknowledge that her work had 'audacity of colour and a certain monumental feeling for form . . . qualities rare enough in Australian painting'.

In August Dyring embarked for Panama whence she travelled by bus to New York, breaking her journey to view major galleries. She had intended to paint in the United States of America, but disliked the work of contemporary American artists and sailed for France. In 1938 she was based in Paris, taking advantage of Atyeo's contacts within the avant-garde. She studied at the Académie Colarossi, the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and with Andre Lhote, although by October she denounced him as a 'racketeer'.

In 1939 Dyring and Atyeo settled on a farm at Vence, France; inspired by memories of Heide, they grew fruit and flowers. Sam accepted a commission to decorate a house in Dominica, West Indies, leaving Moya at Vence. Evacuated to Australia via South Africa, where she painted and searched for tribal art, she then journeyed to Dominica and married Atyeo. They were not happy, neither painted and Dyring was ill. Evatt offered Atyeo work and Dyring accompanied him to the U.S.A. She viewed art, painted occasionally and claimed to have exhibited in Washington in 1943. After World War II Evatt found Sam various postings, while Moya returned to Paris to pursue a full-time career in art. They were to be divorced in 1950.

From about 1946 Dyring's art was more personal than innovative. She gained a considerable reputation among French regionalist and nationalist artists for her sympathetic appreciation of provincial scenes and life. Bernard Smith placed her in the French tradition of intimiste painters. In 1948 she leased and renovated an apartment on the Ile St Louis, which, as Chez Moya, became a centre for Australians who enjoyed her hospitality, cooking and practical assistance. She revisited Australia and exhibited in various cities in 1950, 1953, 1956, 1960 and 1963; the press carried her reports of Parisian cultural life.