Jean Dufy was born in Le Havre in 1888, the seventh of eleven children. His father was an accountant in a metallurgy company as well as a talented amateur musician. We have very few visual and artistic tracks of Jean�s childhood in Le Havre, of his job as an itinerant clerk for an overseas import business, or of his stint as secretary on the transatlantic liner �La Savoie�, which linked Le Havre to New York. Dufy participated in many exhibitions which reflected the music and art of Parisian culture after the war. In 1920 the comedy Le Boeuf sur le Toit introduced Dufy to the great French musicians of the era,[12] and the 1925 La Revue Negre. A cabaret show performed in Paris in the Th��tre des Champs-Elys�es, featuring the newly popular jazz music brought to France by American soldiers at the end of World War I, also lead to the union of color and music in Dufy�s paintings.[13] During the same period, Dufy also created colorful paintings of circuses and clowns, as well as Parisian street scenes including horse-drawn carriages, the gates of Paris, the Eiffel Tower, and the bridges of the Seine.
