Born into a bourgeois Parisian family, Robert Delaunay (1885 - 1941) was introduced to traditional painting by his uncle. Anxious to become a "painter of modernity", he produced his first paintings in 1904, which were closely linked to nature and strongly inspired by the neo-impressionist and fauvist movements. After being excluded from the Salon d'Automne in 1906, he gained a small reputation by exhibiting at the Salon des Indépendants with his paintings of Paris monuments, which were close to Cubism. Despite his attraction to major art, Delaunay spent much of his life in the decorative arts: he created the sets for the Ballets Russes and painted frescoes for various public buildings.

His early works are strongly influenced by Impressionism and by Paul Cézanne's exploration of colour and volume. His painting, which is characterised by its vibrant colours, is a play on tone, depth and perspective. In 1909, Delaunay produced his famous series Paris and the Eiffel Tower. The paintings Air, Iron and Water, Study, Champs-de-Mars, The Red Tower and Eiffel Tower and Garden of the Champs de Mars depict the energy of cities and the contemporary world. Through his work in the series "Les Fenêtres", produced in 1912, as well as the Rythme no1, Robert Delaunay began to explore the world of pure abstract painting, whose visual composition results from the contrasts created by colour. By concentrating on the order of the colours that appear on the canvas, he sought harmony in his painting.

Together with his wife Sonia Delaunay (Sonia Terk), whom he married in 1910, and several others, he was the founder and principal creator of the Orphic movement, a subset of Cubism and an important avant-garde movement in the early 20th century. It was the critic and poet Guillaume Apollinaire who named Delaunay's style "orphism" in reference to one of his poems and thus brought his art closer to music. In simple terms, the Orphic style is a mixture of colour and geometry and is a kind of cross between abstraction and cubism. With Sonia Delaunay, he also invented simultaneism, an art form that seeks to create harmony in the pictorial world by arranging colours simultaneously. He focused on the function of light.

Robert Delaunay died of cancer in 1941 at the age of sixty-six in Montpellier, France.