Henri Matisse did not intend to be a painter. He was studying law and working as a clerk when appendicitis put him in bed for months, and his mother brought him a box of paints to pass the time. He was twenty. He later said that the moment he started painting he felt free, and that nothing in his life had ever felt like that before.
What followed was sixty years of pushing color further than anyone thought it could go, and then, when his body failed, inventing a new way to work from a wheelchair. Everything discussed here is in our Fauvism and Matisse collection.
The Studio Years: Learning the Figure
Before the wild color there was a long apprenticeship, and the best evidence of it is a group of figure studies made around 1900 in the life class. Male Nude in the Studio (1900) is the strongest of them and, as it happens, one of the most popular pieces we sell.
It is worth understanding why it holds up. The academic life class was built around the male model, because the male figure was considered the hardest thing to draw and therefore the proper test. Matisse did that work seriously for years. The result is a painting with real weight and structure, built out of ochre and green shadow, and already showing his instinct to model form with color.
Male Model (1900) comes from the same room in the same year. The two make an obvious pairing, and they suit a study, a library or a dressing room better than almost anything else in his output, because they are quiet, tonal and architectural.
If this is the thread that interests you, it runs well beyond Matisse. Courbet's Study of a Nude Man (1840), Degas' Study of a Male Nude (1858), Corinth's Male Nude (1913) and Eakins' The Swimming Hole (1884) are the same tradition seen through four very different temperaments.
Carmelina (1903) is the last of the dark pictures and the best. The model sits square to us under a hard light, and in the mirror behind her you can see the painter at work in a red shirt. It is a self-portrait smuggled into someone else's picture.
Self-Portrait (1900) and Path in the Bois de Boulogne (1902) fill out these lean years, when he was selling almost nothing and his father had stopped supporting him.
1905: The Wild Beasts
In the summer of 1905 Matisse went to Collioure, a fishing village near the Spanish border, and came back with paintings that did not look like anything. The sea is pink. The hulls are red. The shadows are green. Nothing is described; everything is asserted.
At the Salon d'Automne that autumn his work was hung in a room with several like-minded painters, and a critic named Louis Vauxcelles noticed a conventional Renaissance-style sculpture sitting in the middle of it. Donatello among the wild beasts, he wrote. The name stuck, and Fauvism had one.
Woman with the Hat (1905) was the lightning rod. It is a portrait of his wife Amelie with a green stripe down her face and a hat that is pure invention. People at the exhibition were genuinely angry. Leo and Gertrude Stein bought it, which kept him solvent and changed his life.
Open Window, Collioure (1905) and Interior at Collioure (1905) are the pictures where the window becomes his lifelong device: an interior and an exterior in one rectangle, with the frame of the window doing the composing.
Luxe, Calme et Volupte (1904-1905) and Le Luxe (1907) hung side by side show his whole method of working: try a technique, take what is useful, discard the rest. Pastoral (1905), La Berge (1907) and Brook with Aloes (1907) belong to the same burst.
Blue Nude, Souvenir of Biskra (1907) caused more trouble than anything else he made. When it travelled to the Armory Show and then to Chicago, students at the Art Institute staged a mock trial and burned a copy of it. Picasso studied it closely and it fed directly into what he was doing at the same moment.
Harmony in Red, and Pattern as Subject
Harmony in Red (1908) is the great one. Table and wall are the same red and the same pattern, so the room flattens into a single surface with a window punched through it. It is a picture about the impossibility of telling a tablecloth from a wall when both are that colour, and it is completely convincing anyway.
The story attached to it is true and instructive: he painted it as a blue painting, delivered it, then asked for it back and repainted the whole thing red. His patron Sergei Shchukin accepted the change. Compare it with Dinner Table (1897), the sober, tonal, entirely conventional version of the same subject painted eleven years earlier, and the distance he covered is obvious.
The Red Studio (1911) and The Pink Studio (1911) are the same room in the same year in two different keys. If you buy one, consider both, because the comparison is the point.
Decorative Figure on an Ornamental Background (1925) pushes the collision as far as it goes: a solid, sculptural nude in front of wallpaper so aggressive it will not stay behind her.
The Manila Shawl (1911), Oriental Rugs (1906) and Flowers and Ceramic Plate (1913) are the same instinct at smaller scale. He collected textiles all his life and treated a length of cloth as seriously as a face.
Entrance to the Kasbah (1912) comes from two winters in Morocco. The blue-violet shadow under the archway is doing the work of describing hot light without painting anything hot.
The Portraits
Matisse's portraits are not likenesses in the ordinary sense. Portrait of Greta Moll (1908) took ten sittings, and partway through he went to the Louvre, looked at a Veronese, came back and rebuilt her arms.
Portrait of Greta Prozor (1916) and Mademoiselle Yvonne Landsberg (1914) come from his most severe period, when he was scraping paintings back and leaving the scratched lines of earlier attempts visible in the final picture.
Lady in Blue (1937) was photographed at every stage of its making, and the record shows him steadily removing detail. Madame Matisse (1913) and Laurette's Head with a Coffee Cup (1917) round out the group, and Head of a Woman (1938) shows him doing the same thing with a single unbroken line.
Nice, Illness, and Painting with Scissors
Matisse moved to Nice in 1917 and stayed on the Mediterranean for the rest of his life. The light there produced the long run of interiors: Interior with a Violin Case (1918), Interior with Etruscan Vase (1940), Interior, Yellow and Blue (1946), Large Red Interior (1948) and Interior with Egyptian Curtain (1948).
Garden at Issy (1917), Grey Nude with Bracelet (1918) and Pink Nude (1935) track the figure through the same decades.
In 1941 abdominal cancer and the surgery that followed left him unable to stand at an easel for long. Instead of stopping, he changed medium. He had assistants paint sheets of paper in flat colour, and he cut shapes directly out of them with scissors from his bed and his wheelchair. He called it drawing with scissors, and said it let him carve straight into colour.
Icarus (1947) and Le Toboggan (1946) come from Jazz, the book of cut-outs he published in 1947. Leda and the Swan (1944-1946) belongs to the same late stretch, as does The Dance (1910) in spirit, though it was painted decades earlier.
He spent his last years designing a chapel at Vence, windows and all, and called it his masterpiece. He was, by then, an old man who had been told he had months to live and got thirteen more years.
How to Hang a Matisse
On a white or pale wall: anything from the Fauve years. These paintings were built to be the loudest object in the room and they need a quiet background to do it.
On a dark or saturated wall: the studio nudes and the early tonal work. Male Nude in the Studio, Male Model and Carmelina all have deep grounds and hold up against strong paint colours where the bright pictures would clash.
For a study, library or dressing room: the 1900 figure studies, ideally as a pair. They are serious, restrained and read as drawing.
As a pair: The Red Studio with The Pink Studio. Same room, same year, two temperatures. Match the frames and let the colour do the contrast.
On frames: gold flatters the reds and the cut-outs. Silver suits the blues, the Nice interiors and Lady in Blue. Dark bronze is the right choice for the early studio pictures, where the palette is earth and shadow.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Fauvism, in one sentence?
Painting where colour is chosen for its own effect, named after a critic called the painters wild beasts at the 1905 Salon d'Automne. It lasted only a few years as a movement, but it changed what colour was allowed to do.
Why are the early Matisse figure studies so different from the famous work?
Because they come from the life class, before he had found his own colour. He spent years on academic training built around the figure, and those paintings are dark, structural and closely observed. They are also, for a lot of rooms, the more wearable Matisse.
How are your prints made?
Each is printed to order on archival canvas from a high resolution scan, stretched over an Appalachian Poplar stretcher bar, and finished in an ornate resin frame in gold, silver or dark bronze. Nothing is warehoused, so your piece is made after you order it.
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