Works by Henri Matisse

In 1905 Henri Matisse painted his wife Amélie with a green stripe from hairline to chin, one cheek yellow and the other pink, building on a summer spent trying to free colour from describing things.

Matisse trained in law and only began to paint in 1889, when his mother brought him art supplies as he recovered from appendicitis. He went on to study under Gustave Moreau in Paris. On Belle Île in 1896 the Australian painter John Russell showed him Impressionism and the work of Van Gogh, and Matisse gave up earth tones for bright colour. In the summer of 1905 he worked beside André Derain at Collioure, a Mediterranean fishing village. Landscape near Collioure, a study for The Joy of Life, has blue tree trunks, orange and green leaves, a pink sky and a pool of blue dabs at the bottom. At the Salon d'Automne that autumn a critic's quip named his circle the Fauves, the wild beasts, and Gertrude and Leo Stein bought Woman with a Hat, the picture attacked hardest.

In Morocco in 1912 and 1913 he began, among other changes, to use black as a colour. Goldfish became a subject he kept coming back to. In Goldfish of 1912, three orange fish hang in a glass jar beside a blue vase of flowers and a pale statuette of a nude, all on a dark plum ground. From 1917 he lived near Nice, and for about a decade his painting relaxed and softened. He painted Interior with a Violin in his hotel room there in 1918: the violin lies in its open blue case below a window whose shutters let in a strip of sea and a palm, and the room around them is almost black.

His main model for the winters in Nice was Antoinette Arnaud, nineteen when he hired her in 1917. In White Plumes she wears a hat of his own design, a cloud of white feathers against a flat red ground, and he reached it through many drawn and painted studies. A pen drawing of her, Woman with Folded Hands, crops her head just above the eyes and spends its line on the flowers of her dress. Dated works below run from 1895 to 1929, and many show women; paintings outnumber the prints, which include the 1906 woodcut Seated Nude, all black strokes and zigzags.

Sources: Wikidata, Wikipedia, SMK – National Gallery of Denmark, Minneapolis Institute of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.