Logging, too, benefited from progress. Less demonstrative here than in his depiction of viticulture and harvesting, Dufy shows the pitsawyers whose work would be mechanised and electrified in the sawmills. Further up we can make out the steam barges transporting the processed materials to the port. The looping banks of the river, probably the Seine, are lined with factories all the way to the sea.
Means of transport were diversifying, with new railway, river and land routes and new leisure activities like the cycle race seen here passing a row of trees – a discreet allusion to the Tour de France. The landscape becomes denser, yielding its yellow-green colouring to a large area of flat red: the coming of industry, with its string of workers’ dwellings and smoking factories. Towns spring up and the countryside gradually retreats.
Visuel de la fresque (global, partie concernée)
Dufy visited many industrial sites and documented the remarkable French achievements of his time. His painting of the Villiers-en-Cauchies water tower, built in 1930, is a reminder that improvements to electricity and water supplies between the two World Wars made a real difference to people’s daily lives. Here he has drawn the slag heaps of the mining basin, probably Denain, with the small workers’ houses nestled in between.
Slag heaps, Nord Pas de Calais, Lens
Visuel de la fresque (détail)
Adjacent are the glowing, smoking mouths of the coal-fired power stations, perhaps those of Le Creusot; further up still are the famous sawtooth roofs of the textile factories.
Visuel de la fresque (détail)
Finally, at the very top, the sea is criss-crossed by the sailboats and black steam freighters which had first appeared in the paintings of the 1920s and 30s. It was during the 1939–1945 war that the theme of The Black Freighter really made its comeback, in paintings conjuring up Dufy’s home city – with the port and the industrial life he was so attached to – and Claude Lorrain’s summons to go travelling.
Visuel de la fresque (détail)