Henri Matisse

Reid & Lefevre Gallery, London (acquired by 1966)

Work is in very good condition. Canvas is lined. Surface has been delicately cleaned and retains a rich impasto, particularly in white pigments. Under UV light: a few scattered pin dots of inpainting at extreme upper corners and along bottom and right edges. Otherwise fine.
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Matisse spent the summers of 1895-97 on the island of Belle-Ile-en-Mer off the coast of Brittany (see fig. 1). These years were formative for his artistic development and his early works from this period already reveal a powerful control of color and boldly modern approach to painting. The colors and brushstrokes of the current work in particular presage the stylistic movement of Fauvism that would not develop completely for another 8 years. Hilary Spurling writes of the inspiration which the artist found on the Briton island, "He first visited the island in 1895 on the advice of his Parisian neighbour, Emile Wéry, leaving Paris by train at the start of the summer holiday... This was by his own account the first time Matisse had ever travelled beyond the inland plains of Flanders, and he had chosen for his first sight of the sea the wildest coastline in Europe. Visitors who began exploring Brittany in the 1850s and 1860s in search of the picturesque were amazed by the ferocious grandeur of the cliffs, the pounding waters, and the reefs ranging out to sea in rank upon rank of dark jagged rocks fringed by foam, appearing like teeth starting from the deep to devour any hapless ships that may come within their reach..." (Hilary Spurling, The Unknown Matisse, A Life of Henri Matisse; The Early Years, 1869-1908, New York, 1998, p. 100).

Writing about Matisse's compositions of a few years later, Jack Flam has discussed how divisionism allowed the artist to imbue his canvases as never before. "The neo-impressionist system of small regular brushstrokes, for example, was an alternative to the system of small strokes that Cézanne had used before 1900 and with which Matisse was intimately familiar through Three Bathers. Matisse's translation of Signac's version of neo-impressionism gave him a chance to brighten his palette and to confront Cézanne from a position of strength by using stronger color and a very different kind of light. (One thinks of Pissarro's comment that Cézanne always painted "gray days," the same could have been said of most of Matisse's paintings between 1900 to 1904.) The neo-impressionist style also allowed Matisse to use certain aspects of Cézannesque drawing and treatment of contour -- such as the hatching around contours to fix objects and figures to the adjoining background -- in a way that was no longer obviously Cézannesque" (Jack Flam, Matisse, The Man and his Art, 1869-1918, Ithaca and London, 1986, p. 120).

 

 

Fig. 1 Kervilahouen on the Belle-Ile-en-Mer, where Matisse found lodging