EXCEPTIONAL SALE
Museum Quality Artifacts
Henri Matisse (1869-1954)
Original rough charcoil drawing on thick cotton paper
Signed in full - not dated but from 1939
'Woman with a hood'
This study was a preliminary work for the original 1939 crayon drawing with dedication depicting the image of Lydia Delectorskaya, his secretary and model
The original finished work is owned by the Ermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia
Sheet measures 40 x 27,5 cm (16" x 11")
Work was acquired in 1995 at the Gallery 'Le Sablon' Montmartre Paris with COA
and documentation of provenance
Overall very fine condition - aging paper
Info on : Henri Matisse
Henri Matisse (French pronunciation (31
December 1869 – 3 November 1954) was a French artist, known for his use of
colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman,
printmaker, and sculptor, but is known primarily as a painter. Matisse is
commonly regarded, along with Picasso and Marcel Duchamp, as one of the three
artists who helped to define the revolutionary developments in the plastic arts
in the opening decades of the 20th century, responsible for significant
developments in painting and sculpture. Although
he was initially labelled a Fauve (wild beast), by the 1920s he was
increasingly hailed as an upholder of the classical tradition in French
painting. His mastery of the
expressive language of colour and drawing, displayed in a body of work spanning
over a half-century, won him recognition as a leading figure in modern art.
He first started to paint
in 1889, after his mother brought him art supplies during a period of
convalescence following an attack of appendicitis. He discovered "a kind
of paradise" as he later described it, and
decided to become an artist, deeply disappointing his father. In 1891, he
returned to Paris to study art at the Académie Julian and became a student of
William-Adolphe Bouguereau and Gustave Moreau. Initially he painted still-lifes
and landscapes in a traditional style, at which he achieved reasonable
proficiency. Matisse was influenced by the works of earlier masters such as
Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, Nicolas Poussin, and Antoine Watteau, as well as by
modern artists such as Édouard Manet, and by Japanese art. Chardin was one of
Matisse's most admired painters; as an art student he made copies of four
Chardin paintings in the Louvre. In 1896 and 1897, Matisse visited the painter
John Peter Russell on the island Belle Île off the coast of Brittany. Russell
introduced him to Impressionism and to the work of van Gogh, who had been a
friend of Russell but was completely unknown at the time. Matisse's style
changed completely, and he would later say "Russell was my teacher, and
Russell explained colour theory to me. In 1896 Matisse exhibited five paintings
in the salon of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, two of which were
purchased by the state. In 1898, on the advice of Camille Pissarro, he went to
London to study the paintings of J. M. W. Turner and then went on a trip to
Corsica. Upon his return to Paris in February 1899, he worked beside Albert
Marquet and met André Derain, Jean Puy, and Jules Flandrin. Matisse immersed
himself in the work of others and went into debt from buying work from painters
he admired. The work he hung and displayed in his home included a plaster bust
by Rodin, a painting by Gauguin, a drawing by van Gogh, and Cézanne’s Three
Bathers. In Cézanne's sense of pictorial structure and colour, Matisse
found his main inspiration.
In 1905, Matisse and a
group of artists now known as "Fauves" exhibited together in a room
at the Salon d'Automne. The paintings expressed emotion with wild, often
dissonant colours, without regard for the subject's natural colours. Matisse
showed Open Window and Woman with the Hat at the Salon. Critic
Louis Vauxcelles described the work with the phrase "Donatello au milieu
des fauves!" (Donatello among the wild beasts), referring to a
Renaissance-type sculpture that shared the room with them. His comment was
printed on 17 October 1905 in Gil Blas, a daily newspaper, and passed
into popular usage. The exhibition garnered harsh criticism—"A pot of
paint has been flung in the face of the public", said the critic Camille
Mauclair - but also some favourable attention. When the painting that was
singled out for special condemnation, Matisse's Woman with a Hat, was
bought by Gertrude and Leo Stein, the embattled artist's morale improved
considerably. Matisse was recognized as a leader of the Fauves, along with
André Derain; the two were friendly rivals, each with his own followers. Other
members were Georges Braque, Raoul Dufy and Maurice de Vlaminck. The Symbolist
painter Gustave Moreau (1826–1898) was the movement's inspirational teacher; as
a professor at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, he pushed his students to
think outside of the lines of formality and to follow their visions.
Around 1904 he met Pablo
Picasso, who was 12 years younger than Matisse. The two became life-long
friends as well as rivals and are often compared; one key difference between
them is that Matisse drew and painted from nature, while Picasso was much more
inclined to work from imagination. The subjects painted most frequently by both
artists were women and still life, with Matisse more likely to place his
figures in fully realized interiors. Matisse and Picasso were first brought
together at the Paris salon of Gertrude Stein and her companion Alice B. Toklas.
In 1917 Matisse relocated to Cimiez
on the French Riviera, a suburb of the city of Nice. His work of the decade or
so following this relocation shows a relaxation and a softening of his
approach. This "return to order" is characteristic of much art of the
post-World War I period, and can be compared with the neoclassicism of Picasso
and Stravinsky, and the return to traditionalism of Derain. His orientalist odalisque
paintings are characteristic of the period; while this work was popular, some
contemporary critics found it shallow and decorative. In the late 1920s Matisse
notably once again engaged in active collaborations with other artists. He
worked with not only Frenchmen, Dutch, Germans, and Spanish, but also a few
Americans and recent American immigrants. After 1930 a new vigor and bolder
simplification appeared in his work. American art collector Albert C. Barnes
convinced him to produce a large mural for the Barnes Foundation, The Dance
II, which was completed in 1932. The Foundation owns several dozen other
Matisse paintings.
He and his wife of 41 years
separated in 1939. In 1941, he underwent surgery in which a colostomy was
performed. Afterwards he started using a wheelchair, and until his death he was
cared for by a Russian woman, Lydia Delektorskaya, formerly one of his models.
With the aid of assistants he set about creating cut paper collages, often on a
large scale, called gouaches découpés. His Blue Nudes series feature
prime examples of this technique he called "painting with scissors";
they demonstrate the ability to bring his eye for colour and geometry to a new
medium of utter simplicity, but with playful and delightful power.
In 1947 he published Jazz,
a limited-edition book containing prints of colorful paper cut collages,
accompanied by his written thoughts. In the 1940s he also worked as a graphic
artist and produced black-and-white illustrations for several books and over
one hundred original lithographs at the Mourlot Studios in Paris.
According to David Rockefeller,
Matisse's final work was the design for a stained-glass window installed at the
Union Church of Pocantico Hills near the Rockefeller estate north of New York
City. "It was his final artistic creation; the maquette was on the wall of
his bedroom when he died in November of 1954", Rockefeller writes.
Installation was completed in 1956.
In 1951 Matisse finished a
four-year project of designing the interior, the glass windows and the
decorations of the Chapelle du Rosaire de Vence, often referred to as the
Matisse Chapel. This project was the result of the close friendship between
Matisse and Sister Jacques-Marie. He had hired her as a nurse and model in 1941
before she became a Dominican nun and they met again in Vence and started the
collaboration, a story related in her 1992 book Henri Matisse: La Chapelle
de Vence and in the 2003 documentary "A Model for Matisse".
He established a museum dedicated to his work in 1952, in his birthplace city, and this museum is now the third-largest collection of Matisse works in France. Matisse died of a heart attack at the age of 84 in 1954. He is interred in the cemetery of the Monastère Notre Dame de Cimiez, near Nice.
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