A charming celebration of wine and French culture, illustrated with the lighthearted watercolors of French master Raoul Dufy.

This witty little volume, first published in French in 1936, extols the many joys and benefits of wine. Wine drinkers will take pleasure in Gaston Derys’s quaint appreciation of the grape, and art lovers will admire Raoul Dufy’s joyful watercolors. Reflecting the exuberance and élan of an earlier day, Derys takes us back to a time when the doctor’s favored prescription was an amiable glass of wine.

In Derys’s ode to wine, here translated into English, we discover that the medicinal and therapeutic uses of wine are many: it assists in fighting typhoid, infant sicknesses, and diabetes; it exerts a positive effect on one’s character, beauty, and creativity; and it lends a fortifying power to athletes and soldiers. Supported by the comments of French doctors as well as Dufy’s beautifully reproduced paintings, Derys’s argument to raise a glass of wine becomes pleasantly irrefutable.

Mon Docteur Le Vin, was the brainchild of Étienne Nicolas, the innovative director of the chain of wine shops that carries his family name to this day. In essence an advertisement, the book was designed to promote a specific image of French wine, and hence to help sell wines made in that image. Nicolas wanted to present wine as something healthy and natural, and at the same time cultured and refined—which is exactly what the combination of Gaston Derys’ prose and Raoul Dufy’s art does. Derys, quoting from scientific authorities, offers ostensibly factual evidence of wine’s nourishing properties, while Dufy provides glimpses of elegant haute-bourgeoisie leisure. His paintings do not depict people drinking wine. In fact, only two contain images of wine at all. Instead, the illustrations are of wine’s effects: civilized health and happiness hand in hand. This would be but a pretty piece of propaganda were it not for the fact that the book plays a small part in a much larger story, that of the changing face of wine in French and indeed all of Western culture. More than most of his colleagues in the wine trade at the time, Étienne Nicolas foresaw that the new guarantees of authenticity being legislated in France would lead to new standards of wine quality and, equally important, new habits of appreciation. And he wanted his stores to profit from the change. Mon Docteur Le Vin did not advertise the Nicolas shops or even the wines sold there. Instead, it simply promoted wine.

Raoul Dufy was born in La Havre, France in 1877. Dufy stated "My youth was cradled by music and the sea’. His father was an accomplished musician who communicated his passion for music to his children; Dufy recalled him in lively pen and ink studies. A sound schooling, based on training in Latin, Greek and German was useful in his early career when at the age of 14, due to family financial difficulties he was obliged to earn his living as an accountant. It was in his early 20’s when he was finally able to dedicate himself to his painting, when he moved to Paris. Despite contracting arthritis at the age of 50 he continued painting and to deftly trace the brilliantly conceived lines and colors that make him one of the great French moderns. Although he is perhaps best known as a society painter, the witty recorder of the fashionable world of his time, Dufy’s paintings were just one element of Dufy’s extraordinary artistic versatility. …Watercolors, ceramics, engravings, tapestries and fabrics, stage sets and furniture. In 1950, three years before his death, he visited New York and Boston for medical treatment for his now debilitating arthritis, but he was still able to paint The Brooklyn Bridge, Times Square, and Fenway Park – securing America’s place in his timeless collection of art.

Book Credits
Gaston Derys, also known as Gaston Columb, was a prolific French writer in the 1920s and 1930s. He was an associate director of the Paris Museum of Design. The French painter and designer Raoul Dufy (1877–1953) was born in Le Havre and trained at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. Often associated with Fauvism, he is known for his vivacious use of color in compositions that seem intended solely to please and entertain. Paul Lukacs is a wine columnist for the Washington Times and Washingtonian magazine. He is author of American Vintage: The Rise of American Wine and chairman of the English Department at Loyola College. Benjamin Ivry is a New York–based writer on the arts, a broadcaster and lecturer, and the translator of Albert Camus: A Life. He was cultural correspondent in Paris for such periodicals as Newsweek and The Economist for nine years.

"LUNCHEON IN PARIS WITH RAOUL DUFY"

The Sun, December 30th 1917

My meeting with Raoul Dufy in Paris a year after the war had begun had an amusing touch of surprise.

I had asked young Lieut. Malye, one of James Stephens’ friends, to dinner, and when I came home at 7 the domestique said a soldier had just been calling for me who had said that he would return for me in a few minutes. Thinking of course that it had been Malye, I sauntered out on the avenue to seek him. Just in front of the house under the trees an officer had propped a rebellious motorcyclette upon a rack and it was racing away like mad although standing still. The explosions were terrific. M. Malye not being visible, I joined the little crowd around the exploding bicycle.

Suddenly a young soldier who had been assisting the Lieutenant of the bicycle stepped forward and said, " Is this Mr. McBride?" and when I had replied ‘yes’, explained that he was Raoul Dufy. He had just learned that I was in Paris and had come at once to thank me for the kind things I had written about him in THE SUN the year before.

The people in my house and the neighboring houses, brought to the window by the noise, appeared to be vastly astonished at my share in this military maneuver, which was increased by the arrival of my dinner guest, whom the simple soldiers in the throng, including Dufy, had to salute. The troublesome motorcyclette finally became adjusted and bore its Lieutenant away. Dufy could not dine with me, as his wife would be alarmed at his absence on the day of his "perme" (all soldiers, young and old, having immediately shortened the word "permission" to "perme") so I agreed t lunch with him and Mme. Dufy on July 14. Dufy’s depot is not far from Paris. He is in a bicycle corps, he explained, and that was how he happened to assist the military cyclist in distress in front of my house. He had an afternoon off once in two weeks.

His studio is in Montmartre, in the neighborhood of the Place Pigalle, and it is full of works that America has not yet seen, but would profit by seeing; but before looking at them we ate an excellent luncheon. The plat was a work of art in itself, a roast surrounded by four vegetables of harmonious colors. The dish was decidedly worthy of being painted by M. Dufy. It struck me afterward as strange that M. Dufy, who is fond of still lifes, had never painted such a plat. Being devoted to food myself, I imagined that in the presence of such a piece de resistance the primitive artiste’s emotions – M. Dufy is a primitive – are so aroused that there is no withstanding the imperative desire to "kill the thing one loves" and so every perfect steak surrounded by vegetables gets immediately eaten instead of painted. Certainly none of the modern primitives paints them. They all paint lemons and bananas.
There is a bottle of red wine on the table, but as we were about to sit down M. Dufy said: "Perhaps Monsieur McBride would like white wine; we have some specially good white wine," and without waiting to hear from me he immediately arose and returned with a bottle of cobwebby white. Now I have always noticed that when every work of an artist contains something that is personally pleasant I am sure to find the artist himself simpatico. Once again it proved true. How did he know I like white wine and always drank it in preference? Simply by intuition lui et moi being simpatico.

In the atelier were stacks of canvases, some of them very large. All that I like best had been painted in the Midi, gardens and balconies in the cavalier method of the moderns, but recognizable as gardens and balconies just the same. Dufy’s color is always good, design good, and it can be felt that he could be realistic if he wished. He is not a primitif because he doesn’t know how to paint, but for quite the contrary reason, because he does know how to paint.

He asked me how I stood on the question of Picasso and Matisse and was not horrified at my reply that I never found their work completely successful, though always completely interesting. (We were talking of the abstract performances by these men. Afterward I found abstractions by them that to me were completely successful.) M. Dufy said there were no new names to place beside theirs. For him Matisse has awakened a new interest in painting, which was a great thing. Apparently everything had been said, but Matisse found new ways to say it. Picasso was trying for problems that were perhaps insolvable, but his experiments had that interest.

He showed me a box of silks and damasks printed from his designs, most of them from the "Bestiare," the book of wood prints with text by Apollinaire. Apollinaire, full of fantasy and an amusing fellow, both M. and Mme. Dufy agreed. Dufy had designed stuffs for Poiret. Both Poiret and he felt that the war would not sidetrack modern art. Never could go back to the old, at least. For his part, if he did war things they would be allegorical. Give me a silk pochette of his design, with all the Allies mounted upon white horses. He said Braque had become a soldier, had found himself in the vie militaire. M. and Mme. Dufy said that last year in the first week in September there was an anxious moment. "Heard the cannon, you know," most impressively. "We heard the cannon of the Germans, and in the papers, next day, not a word! We looked to see what had happened – nothing!" Dufy comes from Normandy. His ancestors being originally Irish, hence the name. There had also been a German intermarriage among his progenitors, nevertheless, with a smile and a military salute: "J’èspere que je suis un bon français !

- Henry McBride
The Sun, December 30th, 1917