Robert Delaunay

Robert Delaunay Art Prints and Canvas Prints

Robert Delaunay (1885–1941) was a French painter who co-founded Orphism, a movement that brought pure colour into the geometric framework of Cubism. Where his Cubist contemporaries worked in muted tones and fragmented forms, Delaunay pursued the opposite — radiant colour arranged in concentric circles and prismatic compositions that feel closer to music than to painting. His Simultaneous Discs, painted between 1912 and 1913, are among the earliest fully abstract works in European art. The poet Guillaume Apollinaire named the movement after the mythic musician Orpheus, recognising how Delaunay treated colour the way a composer treats sound.

His most recognisable subjects — the Eiffel Tower fractured into planes of light, the windows of Saint-Séverin dissolving into rhythm — show an artist obsessed with how we actually see, not just what we see. These are works that reward large-format reproduction, where the interplay of warm and cool tones becomes physically immersive. Our collection includes key works like Formes Circulaires, Soleil, Rythme, Joie de Vivre, and The Eiffel Tower — each printed in our Berlin studio with archival pigment inks rated for over 100 years of colour stability.

Printing and Materials

Every Delaunay print is produced in-house in Berlin. Fine art paper prints use 225g matte stock that renders his colour transitions with full tonal accuracy — available in A3, 50×70 cm, 70×100 cm, and A0. Canvas prints use 400g cotton with a natural texture that suits the painterly quality of his brushwork, available in 30×40 cm, 50×70 cm, and 70×100 cm. Both formats use the same archival pigment inks. Framing options include oak, black, and walnut brown — canvas prints can also be ordered with a floating frame for a gallery-style shadow gap.

Orphism and Early Abstraction in Context

Delaunay sits at a pivotal point in early twentieth-century art. His colour theory directly influenced Paul Klee, Franz Marc, and the wider Blue Rider group in Munich. If you are drawn to this period, you may also want to explore our Bauhaus poster collection or works by Wassily Kandinsky, who shared Delaunay's interest in the relationship between colour and spiritual experience. For those interested in other early modern French painting, our Henri Matisse collection offers a different but related approach to colour as the primary subject of a painting.