Dufy painted his native town of Le Havre and the bay of Sainte-Adresse throughout his career. Extensively annotated by the artist with colour notes, this large sheet – despite the apparent spontaneity of the draughtsmanship - underlines the care with which Dufy developed his painted compositions. In its rectangular, panoramic format, the present sheet would appear to be a preparatory study for a large, signed gouache by Dufy, of similar composition and identical dimensions. A slightly smaller variant of the same composition, also drawn in gouache, was in a private Japanese collection in 1983. Both gouaches are in turn related to one of the best-known works of Dufy’s career; the very large painting on cotton of La Baie de Sainte-Adresse, one of a series of fourteen ‘tentures’ commissioned by Paul Poiret for the Exposition des Arts Décoratifs of 1925. These tentures were large wall hangings, painted in mordant colours on dyed cotton and measuring almost three metres high and four metres in length. They were intended to hang as decoration on a barge on the Seine, where Poiret had chosen to display his work during the Exposition des Arts Décoratifs. As one scholar has noted of this particular composition, ‘A frequent event in Le Havre, the regatta played an important part in the life of the people of the city. The sailboat race shown in the hanging is based on the one organized for the visit of the English flotilla. It provides Dufy with an excuse to portray the Seine estuary and the Bay of Sainte-Adresse with its cliffs stretching off to the north, encouraging daydreams and escapism.'