The Jealous Muse, Chapter Seven — Henri Matisse : The Jealous Muse

Across The Margin / ATM Publishing presents Chapter Seven of Arthur Hoyle’s The Jealous Muse — Henri Matisse : The Jealous Muse…

The Jealous Muse, Chapter Seven — Henri Matisse : The Jealous Muse

Matisse is an example of an artist so committed to his muse—painting—that he became consumed by it, subordinating even his most intimate personal relationships to his art, fracturing his family, and finally retreating into a hermetic world that he created to resemble one of his paintings.

His origins were an unlikely incubator for what would become one of the most brilliant artistic careers of the twentieth century. He was born on New Year’s Eve, 1869, in Le Cateau-Cambrésis, a town in Picardy, a dreary, colorless province in the north of France bordering Belgium. His father Hippolyte was a grain merchant who ran a general store in Bohain-en-Vermandois, where Matisse spent his childhood. His mother, Anna, more sophisticated, worked as an interior decorator in Bohain, advising her husband’s customers on color schemes for their homes. She also painted china, and before marrying Hippolyte had worked in Paris as a milliner.

Matisse was a dreamy, sickly youth, fond of pranks, given to unrealistic fantasies about a life in the theater, and prone to episodes of abdominal distress. His father, a practical man, sent him to Paris to study law, and after passing his examinations in August 1888 Matisse returned to Bohain to take up a position as a clerk in a law office. Bored and dissatisfied, Matisse was rescued from the law when he suffered a hernia in 1889 that required hospitalization followed by bed rest. During his convalescence, Anna gave him a paint box to help him pass the time, a gift that changed the direction of his life. Many years later Matisse would write, “From the moment I held the box of colours in my hand, I knew this was my life . . . It was a tremendous attraction, a sort of Paradise Found in which I was completely free, alone, at peace.” (Quoted in Spurling I, p. 46) He painted his first oil, a still life of books on a table in a darkened room, in 1890. At this point in his career, Matisse was painting within the tradition and giving no hint of the revolutionary painter that he would become.

Matisse decided that he wanted to return to Paris to study painting, a move that his father adamantly opposed. But Anna interceded for her son and persuaded Hippolyte to provide Matisse with an allowance of one hundred francs a month for a trial period of a year. A local painting instructor in Bohain provided Matisse with a letter of introduction to Adolphe William Bouguereau, a prominent academic painter who taught at the Académie Julian.

After moving to Paris in the fall of 1891 and studying under Bouguereau, Matisse applied for admission to the École des Beaux-Arts, the pre-eminent French painting school where contemporaries of Matisse such as Alfred Sisley, George Seurat, and Renoir had trained. He failed the entrance examination, but Gustave Moreau, who taught at the École, invited Matisse to study under him. Moreau, a Symbolist painter, was a popular teacher known for encouraging his students to pursue their own visions and find their own styles.

In the summer of 1892 Matisse met and courted Caroline Joblaud, a young woman who worked as a model in Moreau’s studio and went by the name Camille. The daughter of a carpenter, orphaned at a young age and raised by nuns, she had come to Paris from the provinces looking for a more stimulating life. Attractive and lively, fond of music, she found work in a fashionable hat shop and modeled to supplement her income. 

In 1894 Camille and Matisse set up house together at 19 Quai St-Michel. Camille was pregnant, but marriage was out of the question for Matisse, because the law required him to have parental consent. Their daughter Marguerite was born on August 31, 1894. Hippolyte expressed his displeasure by blocking her right of inheritance. At the time, Matisse was enrolled in École des Arts Decoratifs, seeking the degree that would qualify him to teach art in state schools. A teaching position appeared to be Matisse’s only hope of earning money from his art.

In addition to her responsibilities as “wife,” mother, breadwinner, and studio assistant, Camille modeled for Matisse. He painted her twice in 1895, as the figure in Woman Reading and Camille with Lemons and Blue Jug.  Woman Reading was the first of his works to be bought by the state, at the Salon de la Nationale in June 1896. The purchaser was Madame Félix Faure, wife of the President of the French Republic.

In the summer of 1895, Matisse, Camille and Marguerite traveled to Belle-Île-en-Mer, a small island off Brittany’s Atlantic coast, in company with other painters and their models. Matisse and his family took lodgings with a peasant family in their small cottage shared with farm animals.

The paintings that Matisse brought back from Belle-Île —mostly landscapes—gained him entrance into the Societé Nationale in 1896, assuring him the right to exhibit up to ten paintings at the annual Salon. Several of his works sold, and his parents came to Paris and proudly viewed his work hanging at the Champ-de-Mars. Matisse’s career seemed to be taking off.

Matisse, Camille and Marguerite returned to Belle-Île in the summer of 1896.

They settled in Kervilahouen, where they became part of the social circle that surrounded the resident Australian painter John Peter Russell. Russell’s color theory, formed under the influence of Van Gogh, inspired Matisse to lighten his palette.  Matisse painted Breton Serving Girl and The Open Door, Brittany, works whose pictorial features⎯a woman surrounded by domestic objects in an interior with an open door or window⎯anticipated themes of Matisse’s later work.

In the winter of 1897 Camille modeled for The Dinner Table, the painting that ruptured their relationship. The trouble began when Matisse spent their dwindling funds on fruit that they could not eat despite their hunger because it was being used as a visual element of the painting. This was an early instance of Matisse’s willingness to put the claims of his art above the claims of his personal life. The style of the painting also alarmed Camille. It reflected Russell’s influence and indicated that Matisse was moving in a direction that would take him away from the commercial mainstream. The painting is less representational than his previous work, and its complex composition shows Matisse’s interest in patterns created by objects with similar forms—glasses, plates, carafes, silverware, fruit, flowers. Camille implored Matisse to make the painting more conventional, and when he refused, she stopped modeling for him. Matisse replaced her with a wooden dummy and moved out of their studio apartment to a room above the École des Arts Decoratifs. He also signed official papers that verified his paternity of Marguerite.

Camille and Matisse reconciled in May 1897 and spent another summer together on Belle-Île, a period that marked the beginning of his life-long struggle with insomnia, brought on by the relentless pressure of his compulsive need to paint. Camille became increasingly shrill and critical, berating him for the sleeplessness that destroyed their night’s rest and left him unfit for work in the morning. Camille left him, taking Marguerite with her to live with the Russells. Matisse returned to Paris without them in October to attend a wedding at which he was best man.  At this wedding he met Amélie Parayre, who three months later became his wife. Amélie was the bride’s maid of honor. They were seated next to each other and felt an immediate attraction. At this time she worked for her Aunt Nine who owned a hat shop in Paris, the Grande Maison des Modes.

Amélie and Matisse were married on January 10, 1898 in a church just off the Champs-Elysees in the most fashionable district of Paris. Amélie knew very little about painting, but was proud to have married a man she viewed as a visionary. She was untroubled that her husband had confessed to her before their marriage, “Mademoiselle, I love you dearly, but I shall always love painting more,” words that would later bear a bitter fruit. (Spurling I, p. 148) They honeymooned in London. Matisse spent his days studying Turner at the National Gallery. After their honeymoon, they stayed eighteen months in Toulouse, with an interlude in Corsica (Ajaccio), where they rented two rooms at the Villa de Roca. Matisse painted numerous landscapes as well as interiors of their residence. His painting continued to move away from strict representation as he sought to express through color the emotions aroused in him by his subjects. His palette continued to brighten. He simplified forms in pursuit of their essence. Later he would say, “Little by little I began to paint as I felt. One cannot do successful work which has much feeling unless one sees the subject very simply, and one must do this in order to express oneself as clearly as possible.” (Flam. Matisse on Art, p. 66)

The basic pattern of their life together was set on Corsica: a daily routine of work, rest, walks and modeling sessions. A broader life rhythm alternating winters in the south and summers in Paris was also established. Matisse’s painting was the center of their lives, and Amélie fully supported him.

Amélie posed for three paintings by Matisse in the first year of their marriage: a back view of her reading with still life on a table to her left (reminiscent of Woman Reading), a side view of her sewing in the kitchen at Villa de Rocca, and The Invalid painted in January 1899 around the time of the birth of their first child.

A son Jean was born in Toulouse January 10, 1899.  In February, Amélie and Matisse went to Paris in search of work, leaving Jean in Toulouse with a wet nurse. They lived initially in Matisse’s studio at 19 Quai St-Michel. In May, Matisse decided to buy a seminal painting by Cézanne, Three Bathers, although the dealer Vollard’s asking price of 1,500 francs was far beyond his means. Amélie agreed to let Matisse pawn her emerald engagement ring to raise the funds for him to purchase the painting. This sacrifice was a metaphor of her life-long subservience to his art. At this point in his career, Matisse had no dependable income from his art and continued to rely on an allowance from his father.

In June 1899 Amélie opened a hat shop at 25 rue de Chateaudun with a partner. This business venture provided income for her family to live on while Matisse advanced his art. The couple lived in a tiny attic apartment above the store. That fall, Amélie offered to adopt Marguerite as her daughter, putting an end to a tense standoff between Matisse and Camille and giving legitimacy to Marguerite. Camille, as an unmarried woman, had little choice but to accede.

A second son, Pierre, was born on June 13, 1900 in Bohain at the home of Matisse’s brother, Auguste.  Amélie and Matisse returned to Paris for the summer, leaving Pierre in the north with a wet nurse. These arrangements set a recurring pattern in which Matisse’s commitment to his painting took precedence over family unity.

Struggling for sales of his work, Matisse cultivated the dealer Ambroise Vollard, who was a dinner guest at 19 Quai St-Michel, then fell asleep after the meal without looking at the paintings Matisse had planned to show him. But Vollard exhibited forty-five of Matisse’s paintings at a show in June that led another dealer to agree to pay Matisse four hundred francs per painting for academic still lifes. Matisse created several of these paintings and then, fearing they were leading to his artistic death, destroyed the one he was working on. Amélie and Marguerite (now 10), furiously scrubbed the paint from the canvas so that Matisse could reuse it.

In the spring of 1904 Matisse wrote to the painter Paul Signac, whom he had met that winter in Paris, inquiring about the availability of rentals in St. Tropez, a small fishing village on the Côte d’Azur in the south of France where Signac lived. Signac was a practitioner of the style of painting known as Pointillism, a successor to Impressionism that sought to create powerful effects on the eye through the use of contrasting but harmonious combinations of bright color applied to the canvas in dots of paint. Signac lined up a small two-story cottage with four rooms. The Matisses left Paris in July, bringing with them only Pierre because the cottage could not accommodate the entire family. Jean remained in Bohain with his grandparents and Marguerite stayed with a relative.

The brilliant light of the Côte d’Azur, the heat, and the influence of Signac affected Matisse’s painting profoundly, setting him off in new directions in his use of color and his renderings of form, and yielding canvases that were entirely fresh and new, and noticeably brighter in tone. In both his landscapes and his interiors, the colors are vivid, the forms simplified, and the pointillist technique prevails. His most notable painting from this summer was Luxe, Calme et Volupté (“Luxury, Calm and Pleasure”), a decidedly pointillist work in which naked women lounge in various poses on the shore of the bay. A sailboat is moored behind them on the water and a tea set has been laid on a tablecloth on the ground. A clothed woman, modeled by Amélie, sits tensely in front of the tea set—an obvious reference to domesticity—intently observing the naked young women who seem to exist as her fantasy. The painting, in addition to its stylistic innovations, contains the first hint of the tension that Matisse felt between conventional domestic life and the pull of his imagination, which tended towards the sensual and the erotic.

Luxe, Calme et Volupté was shown in Paris at the Salon des Indépendents in the spring of 1905, along with seven other paintings by Matisse. It created a stir amongst the public. Signac subsequently purchased it for 1,000 francs. It now hangs in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, a gift of Signac’s daughter. Another of Matisse’s paintings exhibited at the Salon, View of St-Tropez, was purchased by the state. Matisse was being noticed in the upper circles of the French art world, most especially by Roger Marx, a civil servant with considerable influence over purchases made by state museums. Marx had championed Matisse’s work as early as 1894 and remained supportive as Matisse’s style evolved.

In May the Matisse’s returned to the Mediterranean coast, this time to Collioure, a remote fishing village near the border with Spain that Amélie had discovered while visiting her sister Berthe, who lived nearby in Perpignan.  Jean and Pierre accompanied them, while Marguerite stayed in Bohain with her grandparents. The family took rooms at the Hotel de la Gare, and Matisse rented a room above a café in the port to use as his studio. From there he painted many scenes of life in and about the town, landscapes and interiors, often with Amélie as model. His painting continued to evolve along already established lines: bright, expressive colors, simplification of forms that became suggestive rather than descriptive, with an emphasis on patterns that he combined to make a harmonious whole. He later explained his method as a painter:

For me, the subject of a painting and its background have the same value, or, to put it more clearly, there is no principal feature, only the pattern is important. The picture is formed by the combination of surfaces, differently coloured, which results in the creation of an “expression.” In the same way that in a musical harmony each note is a part of the whole, so I wished each colour to have a contributory value. (Flam. Matisse on Art, p. 120)

He also began to use thematic elements that would become characteristic of his work. Interiors often opened out to exteriors through a window that resembled the frame of a painting, creating the illusion of a painting within a painting Through the open window the outer world, whether landscape or cityscape, enters the painter’s studio and becomes subject to his control.

Amélie regularly posed for Matisse during their stay in Collioure and comforted him as he continued to battle insomnia and anxiety.  Matisse sought relief from the unrelenting pressure of his work through friendship with Etienne Terrus, an older painter who lived ten miles away in Elne. Terrus took the Matisses to meet the sculptor Aristide Maillol and his wife, who lived down the coast in Banyuls-sur-Mer. Matisse, desperate for company, also wrote to the painter André Derain in Paris, urging him to come to Collioure immediately with the promise that his work would benefit greatly from the light and color of the region. Derain arrived in July and took up residence at the Hotel du Gare. The Matisses, economizing, moved to the home of Paul Soulier, a local wine grower who had befriended them. Derain joined Matisse in his studio, and the paintings they produced there that summer, blazing with color, gave birth to Fauvism (so named because the critic Louis Vauxcelles derided the painters as “fauves”—wild beasts) when they were later shown at the Salon d’Automne.

What was remarkable about these paintings was their non-representational use of color, using color not to copy nature but to express the emotions aroused in the artist by his subject. The result was a rendering of reality that was unfamiliar to contemporary viewers, who were conditioned to expect the trunks of trees to be brown, not a violent red or a muted purple. Matisse, and others who painted in this style—Derain, Vlaminck, Jean Puy, Kees van Dongen, Georges Braque—were offering the public a new reality for painting, and the public reaction in Paris was shock, as it was when Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring was performed before the musical audience.

The stress of being a revolutionary in seeing took its toll on Matisse. The insomnia that had plagued him on Belle-Île returned as he wrestled with the energy his painting had released. Amélie also went without sleep, reading to him through the nights to calm him.

After they returned to Paris in the fall, Matisse began work on a painting that would stun the art world and change his fortunes as a painter. Woman in a Hat, an allusion to the millinery history of Camille and his wife, was a portrait of Amélie. She was seated in a chair, giving a three-quarters viewing angle. Her head was turned so that her eyes gazed at the viewer. On her head was an enormous hat that looked like a bowl of fruit, with blobs of colors piled on—blue, orange, yellow, green, purple, brown. Her hair beneath the hat was red. Her forehead was green and blue, her face yellow and blue, her ear orange, her neck yellow and red. She held a large fan that covered her chest and shoulders, painted in these same colors. Her dress was dark green and black, slashed with streaks of red and orange and blue. As she posed for this picture, Amélie was dressed entirely in black, which left Matisse free to see the colors he felt. When Woman in a Hat was hung at the Salon d’Automne, throngs of visitors crowded around it, muttering their disgust and jeering it. One viewer tried to stab the painting. An exception was Sarah Stein, who was attending the showing with her brother-in-law Leo and sister-in-law Gertrude.

The Steins, from San Francisco, had recently settled in Paris. They were art dilettantes, living comfortably on incomes derived from the estate of Daniel Stein, a wealthy businessman. Sarah’s husband Michael managed the family’s wealth. Both Stein families were collecting modern art, and hosted salons at their separate residences, five minutes apart in Paris’s Sixth Arrondisement near the Luxembourg Gardens. Leo Stein was the art connoisseur of the family. After graduating from Johns Hopkins University with a Bachelor of Arts degree he had gone to Florence to write a book about the fifteenth century Italian painter Andrea Mantegna, and while there he befriended the noted art historian Bernard Berenson.  Berenson steered Leo into collecting modern art by urging him to view the Cézannes in Vollard’s gallery. When he reached Paris, Leo began buying Cézanne. At his weekly Saturday salons, Leo held forth on the virtues of the paintings by Cézanne, Gauguin, and Renoir that he and Gertrude had purchased. The salon rapidly became a gathering place for art lovers, intellectuals, and painters looking for buyers.

As Leo stood with Gertrude in front of Woman in a Hat, marveling at it but unsure what to do, Sarah called out above the din, “It’s superb!” and urged Leo to buy it, which he subsequently did, after haggling unsuccessfully with Matisse over the five hundred franc price tag. Thus began a period of patronage from the Steins that would last for several years and put Matisse on the path to financial security.

Not long after his purchase of Woman in a Hat, Leo was taken by the painter Henry-Charles Manguin, another Fauve, to visit Matisse at his studio. Subsequently, Leo brought Sarah and Michael to the studio, and during this visit they purchased Nude Before a Screen. Over the coming year, Sarah and Michael would purchase seven more  Matisse’s, including The Green Line, another striking portrait of Amélie notable for the green stripe that ran from the top of her forehead down the bridge of her nose to her mouth. As Sarah and Michael focused their collecting exclusively on Matisse, they became close friends with the Matisses, often going with them on social outings. Sarah was an ardent advocate of Matisse’s work, and he came to trust her to the point of sharing with her his struggles as a painter. When her friend from Baltimore Etta Cone and her sister Claribel came to Paris, Sarah brought them to Matisse’s studio and they too began collecting his work. Leo and Gertrude also continued to buy Matisses, notably Le Bonheur de Vivre, a large painting in the Fauve manner whose scene of pastoral delights—nude nymphs and shepherds playing pipes, dancing, and making love—drew howls of derision from the spectators. Matisse had now abandoned pointillism, and the colors and spaces of Le Bonheur showed the influence of Gauguin. But Leo eventually tired of Matisse’s style, complaining that his paintings had become “rhythmically insufficient,” while Gertrude, enamored of cubism to the point that she imitated it in her own writing, concentrated on Picasso, who had become a frequent visitor to her salon.

The relationship between Leo and Gertrude and the Matisses came to an end in the summer of 1907. The Steins had invited them to stay at their rented villa in Florence and Matisse, wanting to give Amélie a vacation, agreed to the trip. But in Florence, as Matisse accompanied his host on tours of art galleries, he became annoyed by Leo’s didactic commentary and was unable to conceal his irritation. After the two families had returned to Paris, Leo and Gertrude never bought another Matisse. In 1915, they sold Woman in a Hat to Sarah and Michael.

Despite, or perhaps because of the uproar surrounding Woman in a Hat, Matisse’s stock was rising. The dealer Eugène Druet was buying up Matisses, paying the painter 2,000 francs for each canvas. But his most significant collector was Sergei Shchukin, a wealthy Russian industrialist who had come to Paris to collect modern art. Shchukin had made his fortune in textiles and had developed an eye for color and design. He had been buying the Impressionists—Monet, Renoir—as well as Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Gauguin, for his residence in Moscow. His dealer was Vollard, and on a visit to his gallery he asked to meet Matisse, whose paintings he had seen at the Salon. Vollard brought him to Matisse’s studio, where he bought an early still life, Dishes on a Table, painted when Matisse’s palette was darker and showing the influence of Cézanne. Although he did not buy another Matisse for two years, he began commissioning paintings from him just as the Steins’ buying tapered off.

In May Matisse returned to the south of France, and after a brief detour to Algeria, settled again in Collioure, this time with his entire family, the first time in three years they had all been together. Over the coming months, in addition to the usual landscapes and still lifes, Matisse painted a number of portraits of his daughter Marguerite.

Marguerite was a studio child who never received formal schooling because of her father’s wandering life and because of a chronic throat illness. In July 1901 she contracted diphtheria and a tracheotomy was performed to open her air passages. Her father held her down on a kitchen table during the emergency operation. While in the hospital she came down with typhoid fever and barely survived. She was frail and sickly for the rest of her life, but maintained an indomitable spirit. Matisse painted her for the first time that year (Marguerite) following her recovery.

In Marguerite, a full-frontal portrait, Matisse’s daughter wears a high-collared dress that covers the scar from her tracheotomy. Marguerite’s hair, predominantly dark brown, but accented with green and red, frames her face. Not striving for a fully descriptive, i.e. “representational,” portrait, Matisse presents us with a distinct likeness that carries his feelings for his daughter. She is both pretty and precious, a faint smile showing on her lips, à la Mona Lisa.

Another painting, Portrait of Marguerite, done later that year, back in Paris, is simple, more austere, and Marguerite looks older than her twelve years. She wears a plain dark blue dress open at the neck. A black choker conceals her scar. Her hair, now pulled up on the top of her head, is a subtle swirl of dark green and black. She stands out against a darkened gold background. The letters M-A-R-G-U-E-R-I-T-E spell out her name above her head. The effect of simplicity and directness is striking. Sometime the following year, Matisse exchanged paintings with Picasso, whom he had met at Leo and Gertrude Stein’s salon the previous spring. Picasso chose Portrait of Marguerite, perhaps remembering a visit she had made to his studio in company with her father. He hung it in his studio, where it was used as a dart board by Picasso’s painter friends. Thoughtfully, the pranksters used darts with rubber suction cups so as not to ruin the painting. It now hangs in the Musée Picasso in Paris.

Following the San Francisco earthquake in April 1906 Sarah Stein and her husband sailed for California to determine the condition of their home and belongings. They carried with them several Matisse paintings, including Nude Before a Screen and The Green Line, which they had purchased that winter. After their return to Paris in January, Sarah, with encouragement from Matisse, began painting. She and Hans Purrmann, an aspiring painter from Germany, hired models and used her home at 58 rue Madame as a studio. Matisse had been holding a weekly open house at his Quai St-Michel studio during which he explained his evolution as a painter to attendees, who often included Sarah and Purrmann. They suggested that Matisse offer classes, and he agreed to do this, on condition that they obtain studio space, find pupils, and collect the funds to pay for rent and models. They found space at Couvent des Oiseaux, where Matisse already had a second studio, and Michael covered the rent. Matisse did not accept a fee for his instruction. They recruited pupils from the group of Matisse devotees who had gathered in Paris to absorb his work: Leo Stein, Oskar and Greta Moll, Max Weber, Patrick Bruce, a Dutch girl, a German fraulein, and Annette Rosenshine, who had followed Sarah and Michael from San Francisco after their return. The school began as a drawing class, the students working from plaster casts. Later, when they had moved on to painting, he sent them to the Louvre to copy the masters, as he had done when studying under Moreau. The principles he elucidated when commenting on their work, his aesthetics of painting, were subsequently captured in “Notes of a Painter,” an essay published in December 1908 in La Grande Revue.

Matisse states, “What I am after, above all, is expression . . . Composition is the art of arranging in a decorative manner the diverse elements at the painter’s command to express his feelings.” To truthfully express the artist’s feelings, the painting must have unity and integrity. “For me, it is all in the conception. It is thus necessary to have a clear vision of the whole right from the beginning . . . If there is order and clarity in the picture, it means that from the outset this same order and clarity existed in the mind of the painter, or that the painter was conscious of their necessity.”

His aim in creating a work of art was to achieve serenity, which may explain that he painted ceaselessly in order to free himself from the psychological tensions and anxiety that assailed him. “What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity, devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter, an art that could be for every mental worker, for the businessman as well as the man of letters, for example, a soothing, calming influence on the mind, something like a good armchair that provides relaxation from fatigue.” (Flam, Matisse on Art. Pp. 38-42) It is this aim that gives rise to a religious quality in Matisse’s art, in which the painting induces an altered state of consciousness in the viewer in which harmony and wholeness are experienced.

After the 1908 Salon des Indépendents, Shchukin came to Matisse’s new studio in the Convent of Sacré Coeur, a spacious building that housed Matisse’s family, his studio, and several of the students in his school. Shchukin brought with him Ivan Morosov, another wealthy Russian collector, and was taken with the sight of Bathers with a Turtle, a new work painted in a completely different style that Matisse had just sold to a German collector. Bathers with a Turtle, an obvious homage to Cézanne’s Three Bathers, depicts three nude women grouped around a tortoise at their feet. Shchukin begged Matisse to let him bid against the buyer, and when Matisse refused, he commissioned two paintings. So began a period of patronage that lasted until the outbreak of World War I and gave Matisse financial security. Shchukin ended up buying thirty-seven paintings, almost as many as Sarah and Michael, who owned forty.

In March 1909, Shchukin wrote Matisse from Moscow asking him to provide sketches for two new decorative panels. The works that resulted from this commission, Music and Dance, were done in the style of Bathers with a Turtle: nude men and women, their forms become increasingly generic, used as elements in a design. Shchukin paid Matisse 27,000 francs for these two large paintings, a sum that allowed him to move with his family to a large rented house on an acre of land in Issy-les-Moulineaux, a suburb of Paris. Amélie, after years of sacrifice in service to Matisse’s art, finally had a comfortable residence in which to raise her children.

Matisse completed Dance and Music in the fall of 1910 and exhibited them at the Salon d’Automne in October. Reaction from the critics was so hostile that Shchukin decided not to take them, purchasing instead a large painting by Puvis de Chavannes. The Bernheim brothers, who were dealing the painting, had the effrontery to ask Matisse if the painting could be shown to Shchukin at the studio in Issy, since it was too large for their gallery. On his way back to Moscow, Shchukin changed his mind, and cabled Matisse to send him Dance and Music. Matisse sent them off, but the imbroglio greatly upset him, and shook his confidence. He went alone to Spain to recover. The experience illustrates the risks an artist takes when relying extensively on a single patron. Matisse had painted Dance and Music in the primitive style of Bathers with a Turtle because Shchukin had fancied that work. Shchukin, to make up for his waffling, commissioned two new paintings from Matisse, who was under a doctor’s care in Seville. The project, though it revived him, further upset Amélie because it delayed his return.

Another disturbing force in Matisse’s domestic life was the presence of Olga Meerson, a beautiful thirty-year-old Russian who had come to Paris to be at the center of modern trends in painting. Meerson was already an established painter, trained at the Moscow Art School from the age of thirteen until she left for Munich in 1899 at the age of twenty-one to join the group of artists who had gathered there around the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky. She came to Paris in 1905 and was admitted to Matisse’s school in the summer of 1908, at the time he was painting Harmony in Red for Shchukin.

Meerson was a skilled portrait painter but had decided to pursue a more individualistic vision under Matisse’s tutelage.

Meerson, though talented, lacked the stamina to walk the lonely path that Matisse was following. Although she changed her style of painting, she was plagued by self-doubts that inhibited her. She found herself between two chairs—unable to go back to what was familiar, unable to proceed blindly. Her physical and mental health suffered, and while Matisse was away in Seville wrestling with his own demons, Meerson was admitted to a clinic in Neuilly-sur-Seine just outside Paris. Her stay there may have been brought on by drug use.

In July Matisse brought his entire family to Collioure. Meerson came with them. Was she there because she needed the protective wing of Matisse’s family? Or was she there as Matisse’s mistress? Or both? An undated correspondence from him to Meerson at the convent holds an ambiguous clue. He wrote to apologize for intruding on her room because of “imaginary suspicions” and begs her to forgive his “moment d’égarement”—his momentary distraction. He asks her to tell no one of the incident. What were his suspicions? That she was with a lover? That she was under the influence of drugs again? After Amélie had returned to Issy to place Jean and Pierre in school, Meerson remained in Collioure with Matisse and Marguerite for several more weeks, and during this time Matisse painted Portrait of Olga Meerson.

Shortly after Matisse returned to Issy, he left with Shchukin for a trip to Russia. He stayed at Shchukin’s residence in Moscow, which now, filled with paintings, resembled a museum of modern art. Matisse visited Meerson’s two sisters, who hosted a party in his honor. He discussed with them the advisability of Olga returning to Moscow to live for six months of the year so that she could earn money from her portrait painting on which she could live for the other six months in Paris. This seems an unlikely solution to Meerson’s artistic dilemma. If she could not find her way as a painter in Paris with Matisse, how would it be helpful for her to split her artistic self into two parts, one painting in her old manner in Moscow, the other searching for a new identity in Paris?

Meerson had been staying at Issy with Amélie while Matisse was in Moscow. He learned from his wife that Meerson, upon hearing of this proposal, had resumed her use of drugs. Matisse informed Meerson’s sisters of this and they had her admitted to a clinic in Switzerland run by Dr. Paul Dubois, an eminent psychiatrist. Matisse corresponded with Dubois about Meerson, but limited the information that he provided to his role as her painting teacher. Meerson felt that Matisse had betrayed her. When Amélie intercepted a letter from Dubois that described Meerson’s feelings of deep attachment to Matisse, she too felt betrayed. Matisse then broke off all contact with Meerson and her family.

After her treatment at the clinic, Meerson returned to Munich, resumed painting, married a musician, and bore a daughter. She never saw Matisse again. But the depression that crippled her in Paris continued to haunt her. In 1929 she leapt to her death from the fourth story of a hotel in Berlin. For his part, Matisse left Moscow with a commission from Shchukin for ten new paintings, for which he would be paid 6,000 francs each.

With commissions from both Shchukin and Morosov in hand, Matisse decided to buy the house in Issy-les-Moulineaux. The 27, 000 franc down payment used up nearly all of his ready cash. On the recommendation of his painter friend Albert Marquet, Matisse decided to travel to Tangiers in Morocco. He was seeking fresh imagery and an exotic setting in which to carry out the figure paintings that Shchukin has requested. He brought Amélie with him in an effort to repair the damage to their marriage from the Meerson affair. Pierre was placed in the care of Amélie’s sister Berthe, now living on Corsica in Ajaccio, where she ran a school. Jean was in Bohain, studying with a tutor in preparation for boarding school. Marguerite was left alone in Issy to manage the house. The family was once again dispersed to accommodate Matisse’s painting regimen.

They arrived at the end of January in torrential rain that lasted for weeks. They were staying in a modest hotel owned by a French woman, and they were low on funds because of the house purchase. The rain kept Matisse confined to his room, forced to paint interiors that would not satisfy the criteria set out by Shchukin. The Moroccans’ distrust of Europeans made it nearly impossible for him to obtain the models that he had hoped to paint in their Arab dress. His anxiety grew as the rain persisted, and he became unable to sleep. During breaks in the rain, they went for rides in the countryside, Matisse on horseback, his wife, who was afraid of horses, on a mule. When the rain finally ceased, they made an excursion via mule to the coastal town of Tetuan, and Matisse was briefly refreshed by the landscape they crossed. They made the acquaintance of other painters working in Tangiers, an Irishman and a Canadian, to give them a semblance of a social life. Marguerite, lonely and bored in Issy, wrote them plaintive letters wondering when they would return. Matisse began to view the trip as a fiasco and complete waste of his time.

Near the end of March, the proprietress of the hotel procured a ten-year-old Arab girl named Zorah to model for Matisse, and he painted her twice before fear of reprisals from her brother terminated the arrangement. Amélie left Tangiers on March 31 to rejoin Marguerite, but as he said his farewells to her at the harbor, Matisse’s pent-up anger and frustration spilled onto her in front of other travelers, humiliating her. He was then tormented by guilt and wrote her daily letters of apology.

Once back in Issy, Matisse completed work on The Conversation, a portrait of him and Amélie that he had begun in 1908, when Meerson entered their lives. The portrait captures the tense state of their marriage at that stage of Matisse’s career. Matisse stands in profile on the left side of the frame, wearing blue pajamas with white stripes. His right hand is in his shirt pocket, suggesting that he is concealing something from her. Amélie, dressed in a long black dress with a green collar, sits in a chair, facing him. Matisse stares down at her; she gazes steadily back at him, recoiling slightly from his rigidity. Between them an open window gives a view of a garden with a tree, a lawn, and flowers. The wall of the room forms a dark blue background that sets off the figures. The “conversation” seems to be a staring contest. The open window that separates them resembles one of Matisse’s paintings. It is his art, which once bound them together, that now keeps them apart.

In 1913 some of Matisse’s paintings traveled to the United States for exhibition at the Armory Show in New York, giving Americans their first view of his work. Leo and Gertrude Stein lent Blue Nude, which so outraged viewers that copies of it were burned by art students in Chicago and Matisse himself was hanged in effigy. One American who attended the show and saw in it the future of painting was Alfred Barnes, a wealthy doctor from Philadelphia who would later become an American Shchukin.

Over the summer, Matisse worked feverishly on a painting of his wife that required one hundred sittings to complete and exhausted them both. Portrait of Mme. Matisse is one of the painter’s most famous and most beautiful portraits. Amélie sits in a plain wooden straight-backed chair directly facing the viewer. Matisse has chosen cool colors for the portrait: shades of dark blue for the background that match the colors of her coat and skirt. Her blouse is aquamarine, matching the color of the chair. An orange sash drapes from her shoulder and wraps around her left arm. She wears a black pillbox hat embellished with a flower and a feather. Her face is an oval mask, grey-blue, shaped like the face of a Cycladic sculpture, but with the thin line of her mouth curving upward in a slight smile. Amélie wept when she saw the finished painting. Matisse submitted the painting to the Salon d’Automne, from where Shchukin carried it with him to Moscow. Amélie never posed for her husband again.

On July 28, 1914 Austria declared war on Serbia following the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, and in August Germany declared war on France. Initially, French citizens believed that Germany would quickly be repulsed, and the war would be short. But within months the Germans had overrun Belgium, and French forces were driven back from Picardy. Bohain, where Matisse’s mother and brother Auguste lived, came under German control. Auguste was deported to a prison camp in Germany. Anna Matisse dug in and refused to leave her home. Matisse soon realized that the war would be prolonged and set about adjusting to it. His painting came to a temporary halt as the art market in France dried up and his energies were directed towards aiding the war effort.

In September the French army requisitioned the Matisses’ home in Issy as a military headquarters, and for the duration of the war the residence became a way station for soldiers moving to and from the front, and a gathering place for Matisse’s friends. The children were sent to Toulouse to live with their grandfather, while Matisse and Amélie went to Collioure. Short of money, and worried about his mother, Matisse returned to Paris in October. He was unable to secure an advance from his dealer Bernheim-Jeune, and learned from Shchukin in Moscow that his patron could not transfer funds. He was unable to get news about his mother. He was called up for a medical examination but rejected because of his health (weak heart) and age. In November, Amélie brought the children to Paris and they all stayed at the studio apartment on Quai St-Michel.

Matisse then completed a portrait of Marguerite that he had begun in July, Head, White and Rose, one of the few paintings he executed in the Cubist style. Marguerite had been through a difficult period. She had ambitions to become a doctor, perhaps because of the important role that doctors had played in her life. But she had struggled with her studies and her poor health had prevented her from taking the exams for her baccalaureate degree. She abandoned plans to further her education and fell back into Matisse’s studio world. He painted her numerous times during the war years, at the studio in Paris and later in Nice.

In the winter of 1916-1917 Matisse found a new model, a young Italian woman named Laurette, and once again his painting changed direction. He first painted her in November 1916 as The Italian Woman, and over the course of the next year she sat for him dozens of times in a variety of poses, costumes, and settings. His portraits of her, while not fully representational, rendered her long oval face, dark eyes and hair, and pointed chin in a way that made her easily recognizable as an individual. Matisse often rendered her as an object of desire, a treatment of his models that became increasingly common in subsequent years. He painted her wearing turbans and colorful dresses, lying clothed on the ground next to a coffee cup, lying nude on a bed on top of a flowered bedspread, in a variety of hairstyles, and in company with other women. With Laurette the model became an actress costumed for different roles, and the studio became a stage, an invented world in which Matisse’s imagination could roam. Matisse’s older son Jean, training to become an airplane mechanic at a factory in Issy, fell in love with Laurette, perhaps responding to the eroticism she exuded on the canvas. After an intense twelve month studio partnership with Matisse, Laurette never posed for him again, but she opened the door to a new kind of relationship with the model for Matisse, one in which the model is presented as a sexual object in an intimate, private setting. Matisse played with variations on this theme for several years after the war when he situated his studio permanently in the south of France.

Jean was drafted into the army that summer and posted to Dijon.  Before he left, Matisse painted a group portrait of his family, The Music Lesson. The viewer looks at a scene in the living room of the house in Issy. In the lower left corner of the frame sits a mustached Jean, wearing coat and tie, a cigarette dangling from his mouth. He is reading a book he clenches tightly in both hands. To his left, Marguerite stands close to Pierre, who is seated at a grand piano. An open case holding a violin rests before them on the top of the piano. (Matisse had long been a student of the violin, and during the war had practiced it for hours each day as an outlet for the tension he usually relieved by painting.) Behind Marguerite and Pierre a window opens to the garden, where Amélie sits in a rocking chair, head bowed over her sewing. Beyond her is a small oval pool of murky water surrounded by greenery. At the edge of the pool Matisse has placed a sculpture of a voluptuous nude woman, the muse that beckons the painter to a realm beyond the world of his family.

On Christmas Day 1917 Matisse went to Nice, set up a studio in his room at the Hotel du Beau Rivage, and began painting there. Amélie and Marguerite joined him in January. Nice became Matisse’s new home as a painter and ushered in an entirely new period in his career.

Over the next decade Matisse consolidated his painting base in Nice while maintaining his support system in Paris, where the market for his work existed through the Bernheim-Jeune gallery. Shchukin was no longer buying. Following the Russian Revolution in 1917, Lenin had confiscated Shchukin’s collection and turned his home into a state museum. Shchukin retreated to Nice with enough of his fortune to live a comfortable retirement. To this day his descendants are trying to recover the paintings that were taken from him by the Bolsheviks. Sarah and Michael Stein had left Paris for the countryside during the war and sold much of their collection to a Danish grain merchant. But Matisse’s paintings were now popular with the public, if disdained by the critics, and he sold well.

After the war, Matisse’s family dispersed among his numerous residences. The house at Issy was managed by Amélie and a housekeeper, while Jean and Pierre moved into the studio apartment at 19 Quai St-Michel and tried to become painters. Marguerite shuttled between Issy and Nice, where she frequently modeled for her father. Amélie, when she became bored and lonely, would join her husband in Nice for brief periods of time, but often had to return to Paris with Marguerite, whose damaged trachea needed frequent medical attention and sometimes additional surgeries. Amélie also suffered from poor health—rheumatism, weak kidneys, back pain, as well as bouts of depression brought on by the constant separations from her husband.

The highlight of the year came in the spring when Matisse would ship a fresh batch of canvases to Issy, where Amélie and Marguerite would prepare them for exhibition at Bernheim-Jeune. Matisse usually came to Issy for the summer to escape the Mediterranean heat, and for a couple of months the family would be reunited, until he returned to Nice in September and the cycle would repeat itself. The pattern of disruption and separation wore Amélie down, and in the fall she often went to spas for treatment after Matisse had returned alone to Nice.

In 1921 Matisse gave up hotel living in Nice and established his studio in a two-room apartment at 1 Place Charles Felix, located in the old section of town near the sea. This became his home in Nice for a number of years. He eventually occupied the entire top floor of the building. He worked there with a young model named Henriette Darricarrière, a dancer and violinist. She came to the studio every day except Sunday and stayed for seven hours. On breaks from painting, she and Matisse played violins together. Henriette was the central figure in what became known as Matisse’s odalisque period. She posed, in a variety of settings, nude or in costume, as the submissive concubine in a harem, presented as a passive object of sexual desire, languid, seductive, remote.

Commentators have remarked on Matisse’s use of the sexual charge exuded by his models to energize his paintings by transferring to the objects under his gaze, through color, the emotions aroused in him by the model. And Matisse himself said about his relationship to the model, “The presence of the model counts not as a potential source of information about its makeup, but to keep me in an emotional state, like a kind of flirtation which ends in a rape. Rape of what: of myself, of a certain emotional involvement with the object that appeals to me.” (Janet Hobhouse. The Bride Stripped Bare, p. 94)

It is tempting to see in his rendering of Henriette as odalisque the expression of Matisse’s relationship to his muse, an idealized female figure who holds him in thrall, demanding that he obsessively, relentlessly, paint. His subjugation of the model as concubine, his transformation of the studio into a harem, places them both in the private world of his own psyche, with the woman serving as the anima figure with whom he seeks imaginative union through his brush. The outside world—the world of a society that engages in war, of critics who fault him without understanding him, of family that makes demands on his time and calls him away from the studio—is the world of imperfection, of tension, of disharmony that he seeks to resolve in his art. The critic Donald Kuspit traces Matisse’s intense connection with the female model to the profound role that Anna Matisse played in his development as an artist.

Without his mother’s help, Matisse probably would not have become an artist. She gave birth to his art as much as she gave birth to him . . . His every act of art became an unconscious re-creation of her presence: a return to her as the origin of his art, as well as a “proof” that she and Matisse were one in and through art . . . She taught him that to be an artist meant to be as sensitive, empathic, and responsive as a woman, but also as determined as a man. It meant to put oneself in a loving state of being, in which one was open to inspiration . . . Above all, it meant to have profound empathy, even passionate concern, for the spectator, who turned to art as a last resort, the last possible cure for his ailments. (Kuspit, pp. 34-36)

As the decade unfolded, the dispersed family members remained involved with Matisse’s painting. His art was the sun around which others’ lives orbited. Amélie, increasingly marginalized and irrelevant to Matisse’s studio, became chronically ill and morose, her spirits lifting only when the sadness in her letters to him prodded Matisse to summon her to Nice. When her father died in November 1922, Matisse was too absorbed in his painting to accompany his wife to the funeral.

By 1929 Matisse had painted himself and Henriette into exhaustion. He had featured her in nearly one hundred paintings over the course of their collaboration. Henriette ceased modeling, married a schoolteacher, and became the mother of a girl who would one day pose for Matisse. Matisse hired a seventeen-year-old dancer, Lisette Lowengard, to replace her as model. But his painting had momentarily dried up. He complained to Amélie of standing before a blank canvas with no ideas. His left arm pained him, and a doctor, after diagnosing acute neuritis, insisted that Matisse put down his brush and rest. As he often did when reaching a dead end in his art, Matisse decided to travel in search of fresh light and new colors and patterns. He reserved a double cabin on a steamship from San Francisco to Tahiti, planning to cross the United States from New York by train. But three months before their departure on the Ile de France, Amélie collapsed in Paris while undergoing treatment for her various ailments. Her doctor ordered months of complete bed rest. She returned to Nice to convalesce, and Matisse hired Lisette to serve as her caregiver while he traveled. He sailed alone for New York on February 25, 1930.

Matisse marveled at New York, its skyscrapers and busy streets, which he found modern and energetic. He visited the gallery that Pierre had opened there, went to the Metropolitan Museum, and attended a Broadway show. A fellow painter traveling on the Ile de France alerted New York’s cognoscenti of Matisse’s presence among them, and social gatherings in his honor were quickly organized. After three days, he left for San Francisco, with stops along the way in Chicago and Los Angeles

Upon his arrival in Papeete eight days later, he was met by Pauline Chadourne, a local beauty whose mother was Tahitian, her father French. Pauline had booked him into his unpretentious hotel, and served as his guide and companion throughout his nearly three months stay. He paid his respects at Gauguin’s unmarked grave, and had a meeting with the painter’s son Emile, an illiterate fisherman who lived without a care in the world. The filmmakers F.W. Murnau and Robert Flaherty were in Tahiti filming Taboo, and they invited Matisse to stay at their filming location on a remote part of the island. Matisse wrote long daily missives to Amélie in the evening before going to bed and sent them out in batches on departing ships.

Matisse was put off by the decadent hauteur of the French colonists, who looked down on the native Maori while taking advantage of the liberality of their customs, especially their sexual freedom. And despite the splendor of the setting, Matisse was not experiencing the visual rejuvenation he had sought in coming to the South Pacific He became impatient to leave. But the trip was redeemed for him when he sailed to the coral island of Apataki, where he stayed as the guest of Francois Hervé, a French administrator and friend of Pauline. The isolation of the island, the stillness, the kindness of his host, but most of all the changing colors of the sky under which he strolled at sunset, and of the lagoon where he swam, with its strange, beautifully colored tropical fish, gave Matisse’s eye the renewal he had been seeking.

A tearful Pauline saw Matisse off at the harbor on June 15. After a six-week voyage home via the Panama Canal, his vessel Ville de Verdun docked at Marseilles on July 31. Matisse went immediately to his studio in Nice and resumed work on a painting of Lisette he had begun before the trip. Amélie was still bedridden.

But in September he was back in the United States, serving as a juror for the Carnegie International Prize, which was awarded to Picasso. During this trip he arranged a meeting with Dr. Albert C. Barnes, a wealthy businessman who was in the process of creating a museum to house his large collection of modern art. He owned nearly two hundred Renoirs and eighty Cezannes, in addition to works by Matisse and Picasso. Matisse traveled to his residence in Merion, Pennsylvania, and while there Barnes commissioned him to produce a mural for the central hall of the museum, an enormous undertaking for which Barnes would pay Matisse $30,000, a sum that Pierre, when he learned of the contract, thought woefully insufficient. But Barnes knew that the art market had dried up with the onset of the Depression, and Matisse was happy to have the project. He came back to Merion in December to study the central hall and take measurements.

The Barnes commission took two years to complete, and left Matisse in a state of exhaustion and despair. It was the largest scale work he had ever attempted and was further complicated by the architecture of the central hall, whose three rounded archways partially dictated Matisse’s design. He rented a large garage in Nice to serve as studio and set to work. His theme was the dance, all female figures to be modeled by Lisette. They went to the garage each morning at eight am, leaving Amélie alone in her fourth story bedroom at 1 Place Charles Felix. Matisse put Lisette on a strict program, limiting her diet, requiring regular exercise to keep her fit, and insisting that she retire to bed each evening at an early hour so that she would be rested and fresh for the next day’s work.

Matisse devised a whole new way of working in order to carry out the commission. Using a piece of charcoal on the tip of a long bamboo pole, Matisse drew the figures in the dance on a white wall. He then experimented with color combinations using paper cutouts that Lisette would pin to his designs. The process was arduous, as Matisse continually altered the shapes, searching for a harmonious composition. After a year’s work, as he approached completion of his design, Matisse discovered that the measurements of the central hall that he had taken were inaccurate. Barnes was furious and came to Paris to discuss with Matisse how to proceed. Matisse, undeterred, proposed simply starting over, and Barnes agreed. The mistake, by serving as a trial run, enabled Matisse to proceed confidently with the second version.

In September 1933, with the second design completed, Lisette, no longer needed as a model, resumed her duties as Amélie’s caregiver, and Matisse employed a young Russian woman to serve as his assistant as he added color to the design. When he had made his color selections, Matisse hired a housepainter to apply paint to the canvas. Matisse then held a showing of The Dance at his garage studio, attended by family members, painter friends, and an American journalist, Dorothy Dudley. No one else in the French art world saw the finished painting.

On May 12, Matisse arrived in New York. Pierre drove him down to Merion with the canvases. Barnes would not allow Pierre to accompany his father to the central hall, and after the tryptic was hung, he announced that he would not permit anyone to view it. He relented only to enable Pierre to photograph the three panels. Matisse never saw them again, and they were withheld from the viewing public for decades. An article written by Dudley and published in Lincoln Kirstein’s literary quarterly Hound and Horn provided the only eyewitness account of the painting. The results of Matisse’s two-year struggle were almost completely hidden from view, locked away in Barnes’s museum.

After his return to Nice following the Barnes fiasco, Matisse did very little painting for several years while his life was consumed with a variety of domestic problems. His difficulties began when he decided, perhaps out of frustration that his largest scale work to date would not be seen by the public, to resume work on the aborted version of Barnes’s commission for The Dance. His obsession with completing this piece, to the neglect of his marriage, drove Amélie to move nearby to her sister’s apartment, which Matisse was renting for her. During the three-year period that Matisse worked on both versions of the commission, Amélie had never left her bedroom.

A contrite Matisse, bearing gifts, made daily courtship visits to Amélie, and in November, after he had completed the project, she returned to their residence. This version of The Dance was subsequently purchased by the director of the Petit Palais, a new museum in Paris, but immediately went into storage in the basement, and so it too remained unseen by the public.

Matisse hired the young Russian woman who had replaced Lisette as his studio assistant to be Amélie’s caregiver and companion. Lydia Delectorskaya was a twenty-four-year-old Russian émigré living marginally in Nice, scraping by on odd jobs as a model and movie extra. She was born in Siberia and orphaned at age 12 when both of her parents died in epidemics of typhoid and cholera. She was brought up by an aunt who fled with her to Manchuria to escape the Revolution. They later moved to Paris. Although accepted as a medical student at the Sorbonne, the tuition fees charged to foreign students were beyond her reach. At 19, she made a disastrous marriage to an older man that lasted only a year.  With a boyfriend, she moved to Nice to join the community of Russian émigrés seeking work as models, film extras, and casino dancers. After she had assisted Matisse with The Dance, he loaned her 500 francs with which to open a tearoom, but her boyfriend lost the money in a single evening at the casino. She performed in dance marathons to earn the money to repay Matisse, and when he learned of this, he forgave the debt and later, at Amélie’s urging, hired her again.

In May 1934, Lydia accompanied Amélie to her sister’s residence in Beauzelle, where she planned to spend the summer. Also with them was Marguerite’s son Claude. Marguerite was then coping with the breakdown of her marriage. Her husband, George Duthuit, had become romantically involved with a married Englishwoman while staying in London to deliver a lecture series on modern art. Marguerite had collapsed in Paris under the stress, and when she recovered had gone to stay with Pierre in the U.S. In Beauzelle, Amélie also collapsed. Matisse shuttled from crisis to crisis, arranging nursing care for Marguerite at her sickbed in Paris and seeking medical help for Amélie in Toulouse.

As the new year opened, Amélie was back in Nice. Claude was also living with them, while Marguerite embarked on a new career in Paris as a couturier. Lydia moved in with the Matisses, continuing as companion to Amélie and nanny to Claude. In March, Matisse painted her for the first time, and a shift took place in their relationship. Although Lydia had experience working as a model, she had not enjoyed it, and Matisse had shown no interest in having her sit. In her memoir of this time, With Apparent Ease, Lydia remarked that she was “not his type.” But one day as she sat in a characteristic pose, leaning into a chair back with her head resting on her crossed arms, Matisse ordered her to hold still and proceeded to sketch her. The sketch became the basis for The Blue Eyes, the first of more than ninety portraits of her he would execute in the coming years. She became his artistic soul mate, and in the process eventually displaced both Amélie and Marguerite.

In May Matisse began painting her as The Pink Nude, a canvas that took him six months to complete. In this painting, Matisse has returned to an emphasis on geometric form. A pinkish-red nude figure sprawls across the canvas, lying on a blue and white checked fabric. Her limbs swirl in voluptuous curves that move the eye along her body. Her oval-shaped head, disproportionately small, is swiveled to face the viewer. Matisse is working primarily with mass and color in a way that produces a nearly abstract painting. The model has been reduced to pure form.

The approaching war was felt in the Matisse household, and across France. Alarmed by Germany’s invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938, Amélie left for her sister’s house in Beauzelle, accompanied by a nurse and carrying paintings. But when the Munich Agreement appeared to defuse the crisis, Lydia was sent to fetch her back to Nice. On her arrival there, Amélie demanded that Lydia be dismissed. Matisse resisted, insisting that he needed her for his work.

The Matisses had moved that year to large apartments in the former Hotel Excelsior-Palace, and Lydia had moved with them. In December, she left to take a room in a boarding house, with the understanding that she would come in daily for work in the new year. Amélie also opposed this arrangement. Ten days after leaving the Matisse household, Lydia shot herself. But her life was spared because the bullet struck her breastbone, and she accepted the result. She left for Paris to live with her aunt. In March, Amélie also moved out, taking up residence at the Matisse apartment in Paris with Marguerite, and retaining an attorney to draw up papers for a legal separation and division of property. Matisse located Lydia and asked her to return to work for him.

When France declared war on Germany in September 1939, Matisse was also in Paris, taking part in the inventory of his work. He and Lydia, the painter and his muse, fled to the sanctuary of the studio in Nice, refugees from family and war. A new cycle in Matisse’s life began.

Matisse’s family blamed Lydia for the breakup of his marriage. In her fury, Amélie spread scandalous gossip about the relationship between her husband and his assistant, but Lydia in her memoirs insisted that theirs was a chaste relationship, defined by the boundaries of his studio. She slept in the attic at the Excelsior-Palace, reported for work every morning, and addressed her employer with the formal “vous” as a way of maintaining professional distance. But her behavior during the war years, as Matisse’s health deteriorated, reveals that there was a strong emotional bond between them, perhaps more on the order of a father and daughter. In 1939, Matisse was seventy, Lydia twenty-nine.

The war disrupted life for Matisse and his family, as it did for everyone living in France. In May 1940 Germany invaded France, and German troops entered Paris on June 14. Matisse’s brother Auguste fled Bohain with his family and relocated in Beauzelle, where Amélie and her sister maintained separate households. Marguerite brought Claude there also, but when France capitulated and the Vichy government was formed, she sent her son to New York to live with his uncle Pierre for the duration of the war. The stress of events brought on a recurrence of Matisse’s abdominal pains.

In December 1940 Lydia wrote to Marguerite warning that her father’s life was in danger. The treatment that Matisse was receiving from doctors in Nice was not relieving his symptoms, which were acute. He was in severe pain, losing weight, and unable to sleep. Marguerite came immediately to Nice and arranged medical care for Matisse at a hospital in Lyon. Matisse underwent a colostomy to remove a blockage in his colon that doctors traced to the hernia that had disabled him as a young lawyer. He remained in the hospital for three months, and once was close to death from a pulmonary embolism. Too weak to travel after his discharge, he moved with Lydia to a hotel in Lyon at the end of March, before returning to Nice in May.

Matisse lived as a convalescent in his studio, which existed as a world apart from the insanity of the war raging around them. The studio was fitted out to resemble the scene in one of his interior paintings, with flowers, elegant objects, birds kept in an aviary, colorful textiles—the environment of “luxe, calme et volupté” that remained Matisse’s ideal. He was bedridden, attended by day and night nurses, and too weak to paint. He drew instead, and worked on Themes and Variations, a book of his drawings to be published with a prefatory essay by the surrealist poet and Resistance fighter Louis Aragon, who visited him in December. Lydia reported that despite his weakened condition, he kept to his regular work schedule and would also draw or sketch at night when he was unable to sleep.

Matisse resumed painting in August, using as models young women washed up on the shores of Nice by the war. In September his eye was taken by Monique Bourgeois, a young woman who had been hired as a substitute night nurse, and he asked her to pose. Monique would become a pivotal figure in the crowning achievement of Matisse’s career as an artist, the Chapel at Vence.

Monique was an inexperienced, frightened woman whose family had been displaced from their home in Metz by the war. Her father had died, her mother was ill, and she developed tuberculosis, from which she was only partially cured when she met Matisse. She was living in a boarding house in Nice and had sought work through a nurses’ placement bureau when she was assigned to Matisse’s bedside. Monique attended Matisse for fifteen nights until his regular night nurse resumed her duties. Matisse was immediately taken with her innocence and freshness, and after her service ended, he asked her to pose for him. He painted her in Monique in a Grey Robe, Interior with Bars of Sunlight, and The Idol in 1942, and for Monique Bourgeois in 1943. Disappointed that the portraits did not resemble her, Monique asked Matisse why he did not paint realistically, and he explained his theory of painting to her.

In May 1943, as U.S. troops moved up the peninsula of Italy, Matisse, fearing the destruction that an allied invasion would bring to Nice, moved his studio and household to Vence, a hillside town fourteen miles to the north. He rented a simple house there above the town with the ironic name Villa le Rêve (The Dream House). The Germans sequestered the basement of the house as a canteen for their soldiers. Amélie and Marguerite returned to Paris from Beauzelle to join the Resistance. Amélie, now seventy-two years old, had shed all her ailments and cast off her depression since separating from Matisse. Marguerite served as a courier, while Amélie worked as a typist of intelligence reports being transmitted to London. Both women were arrested by the Gestapo on the same day in April 1944. Marguerite was imprisoned in Rennes and tortured. Amélie was sentenced to six months imprisonment in Fresnes. When the Allies landed in Normandy in June, Marguerite was deported to a concentration camp in Germany but escaped when the train carrying her was bombed by Allied planes. Paris was liberated on August 24, and shortly thereafter Amélie was released from prison. When Allied troops landed on the southern coast, Vence was also liberated.

As the war raged, Marguerite faulted her father for distancing himself from the destruction by continuing to paint decorative interiors, still lifes, and pretty young women posing in colorful outfits. Indeed, the titles of the paintings that he produced during the war years testify to his determination not to bend his aesthetic to the circumstances of time and place, no matter how terrifying. He steadfastly pursued tranquility and harmony, the hallmarks of his work, as though to assert their overriding permanence and preeminence. Venetian Armchair with Fruits, Seated Woman with Flower, Dancer in Blue Tutu, Lemons and Saxifrages, Anemones and Chinese Vase defiantly insist that the war will not sidetrack him from his artistic mission to uphold a higher reality.

Lydia also proved her mettle during the war. As food and basic necessities like fuel for heating became virtually unobtainable, and Matisse refused to patronize the black market, Lydia roamed the countryside on her bicycle, foraging for firewood and bartering for produce from local gardens. Though she was under suspicion as a Russian national, the authorities allowed her to continue as Matisse’s assistant, perhaps out of deference to Matisse’s stature as an artist and his delicate health.

For the duration of the war, and in the years following, Matisse had maintained contact with Monique Bourgeois. She visited him, shyly showed him her drawings, and corresponded with him when she traveled to visit relatives in other parts of France. Matisse adopted towards her the attitude of a benevolent grandfather, encouraging her art, sending her money, hard-to-obtain delicacies like fresh fruit, and medicines. Struggling with poor health and poverty, she had been unable to pursue her nursing studies and had decided to join the Dominican religious order in Vence, Foyer Lacordaire, a nursing home.  She took her temporary vows in September 1944 and was given the name Sister Jacques-Marie. The nuns were planning to create a chapel in an abandoned garage bordering their property, which faced Villa La Rêve. Sister Jacques was given the task of designing stained glass windows for the chapel. She brought a watercolor to show Matisse, whereupon he declared that he would design the windows. So began a project that would last four years, drain Matisse of much of his remaining life force, and exhaust Lydia with its demands on her time and spirit: The Chapel at Vence.

Initially, Mère Agnes, the mother superior, and the nuns at the Foyer opposed Matisse’s involvement in the project. They regarded as sacrilege the idea that a hedonistic painter whose works often featured young women in various states of undress would design the holy space of their chapel. Sister Jacques knew from her correspondence with Matisse that he regarded his art as divinely inspired, produced in service to God, but as a novice she had no standing to argue with her superiors. After taking her vows, she had written to Matisse that she now felt separated from him spiritually because he did not take the sacraments. Her letter provoked a lengthy response from Matisse in which he revealed the religious impulse that lay behind his painting.

I have no need to receive priestly lessons at the end of my life. I have had no need of sacraments to glorify the Creator the entire length of my life. I went all the way to Tahiti to admire His beautiful light, in order to bring it from there to others through my work . . .

You pray for me, thank you. Ask God to give me, in my last years, the light of the spirit that will keep me in touch with Him, which will permit me to finish my career, long and laborious, because I have always sought to reveal to blind man His obvious glory through exclusively earthly nourishment. Ask Him to give me health for that, although this wish may have to take second place . . . (Soeur Jacques. Henry Matisse: La Chapelle de Vence, p. 55)

Fortunately for Matisse and Sister Jacques, who was caught in the middle of a contest of wills between Matisse and Mère Agnes, a Dominican priest with a sophisticated knowledge of modern art was recuperating at Foyer Lacordaire and, upon learning that Matisse lived nearby, arranged a meeting with him to discuss the stained glass windows. At this meeting, which took place in December 1947, Brother Louis Bertrand Rayssiguier and Matisse drew up a plan not simply for the stained glass windows, but for the entire chapel, down to details for a decorative wall depicting the Stations of the Cross, the vestments and altar cloth, and the goblets holding the sacred wine. As the ultimate expression of his aesthetic principle of harmony and tranquility Matisse would design and oversee the construction of a sacred space dedicated to the worship of God.

At the beginning of 1949, Matisse decided to move his studio operations back to the Regina in Nice, where he would have a much larger space in which to work. His crew of helpers included a cook and housekeeper, a day nurse and a night nurse, studio aides, and models. Matisse worked from a taxi-bed that could be rolled from room to room as he experimented with color combinations for the seventeen window panels, in addition to designing the Stations of the Cross, drawing a portrait of Saint Dominic for the ceramic wall behind the altar, a portrait of Mary and the baby Jesus for another ceramic wall, and sculpting Christ on the cross with modeling clay. No detail, whether it was tiles for the roof, the heating and ventilating system, or the candlesticks for the altar, escaped his eye. Lydia ran the entire operation like a factory foreman. So intent was Matisse on completing the project that his crew was required to live at the Regina with him, and he enforced a strict curfew, turning the studio into a kind of artistic monastery. A local architect was retained to supervise the construction of the chapel. In a strange coincidence, the dimensions of the chapel matched the dimensions of the Regina studio.

The first stone of the chapel was laid on December 12, 1949.  A year later the windows were installed. Matisse did not attend these ceremonial events, though he did make visits to the construction site. He was also absent when the completed chapel was consecrated on June 25, 1951. A Mass was celebrated, and the Little Singers of the Côte d’Azur performed songs. Father Couturier, a church official from Paris, read a letter from Matisse.

The chapel sits on a hillside above the town of Vence, giving views of the Mediterranean coastline and the sea. The building is oriented on an east-west axis to capture the most sunlight. The south wall carries fifteen stained glass windows designed in floral patterns of green, blue, and lemon-yellow glass that transmit their colors onto the white marble floor and onto the facing white tiled ceramic wall on which Matisse has drawn figures of the Virgin Mary and the infant Jesus in black outlines. On the rear wall, Matisse has drawn, again using simple black outlines, the Stations of the Cross.

The apse holds a plain marble altar and the nuns’ choir. Nine stained glass windows throw their light on the choir. Behind the altar, two stained glass windows, predominantly blue, but decorated with green and yellow flowers, represent The Tree of Life. Matisse has designed these two windows to give the appearance of hanging drapes. On the white ceramic wall facing the nuns’ choir Matisse has drawn the robed figure of Saint Dominic, the patron of Sisters’ order. Father Couturier modeled for this drawing, also done in Matisse’s abstract outline style.

The chapel is quite small: fifty feet long, twenty feet wide in the nave, thirty-five feet wide from the apse to the nun’s choir. The simple elegance of its forms, the brilliance of its colored light effects, give the sense of bringing the visitor inside one of Matisse’s paintings. Matisse considered it his masterpiece, the crowning achievement of his career. The nuns and Mère Agnes, so long stubbornly opposed to the project, were won over when they experienced the sacredness of the chapel’s space during the first service. They became its strongest defenders against conservative critics who faulted Matisse’s abstract iconography. The chapel is now a major tourist attraction in France and has been compared to the Sistine Chapel.

At the conclusion of the war, Matisse attempted to reunite his family, but met with only partial success, due in part to the continued presence of Lydia in his life. Marguerite came to Vence in January 1945 and stayed with her father for two weeks, leaving him in despair from her descriptions of her treatment by the Gestapo. The torture she endured became so unbearable that she had contemplated suicide in her cell. The protests of other prisoners probably saved her life.

In July Matisse and Lydia went to Paris, where they stayed in Matisse’s apartment on Boulevard Montparnasse. Pierre flew in from New York. Jean was then still living in Issy with his wife and son. But in the following year his marriage broke up, and Pierre’s shortly followed suit. Marguerite had taken her own apartment, which she shared with Amélie. Claude remained in New York with his father. The reunion was awkward for Matisse and Lydia because Amélie refused to speak to them. In 1946, Matisse and Lydia made another visit to Paris, spending the winter there, to the detriment of Matisse’s health.

After Matisse and Lydia returned to Vence in the spring of 1947, Picasso and his lover Françoise Gilot were frequent visitors. Matisse astonished them with displays of his cut-out paper technique as he sat up in his bed with scissors and paper shaping colored patterns that fell to the floor of the studio like leaves from a tree. But Picasso, an avowed Communist and atheist, was not sympathetic to Matisse’s chapel undertaking, suggesting rudely that Matisse’s time would be better spent designing a brothel. Matisse was amused, but Gilot was horrified.

Matisse had one final burst of easel painting in 1947, before he began work on the chapel. His subject matter remained unchanged—beautifully dressed women in colorful interiors—but he was pushing his style towards more abstraction. When he was finished with the chapel, he resumed working with paper cutouts and drawings. His final work was a stained glass window commissioned by Nelson Rockefeller to commemorate his mother.

Following the completion of the chapel, Matisse’s health went into steep decline. His doctor said that Matisse had worn out his heart working on his masterpiece. He died on November 3, 1954 at the age of eighty-four, with Lydia and Marguerite at his bedside. Sister Jacques had suggested that Matisse be buried in the chapel, an idea that Lydia vehemently opposed and discouraged the Sister from even mentioning to Matisse. A funeral Mass, attended by family members and local dignitaries, was performed in Nice by the Archbishop. Lydia was not invited, nor was she any longer in Nice. She had left the day following Matisse’s death, carrying with her artwork that Matisse had given her for her financial security. She donated this artwork to Soviet Russia before she died in 1998. Marguerite and Amélie, who was now living in Aix-en-Provence, resumed their roles as caretakers of Matisse’s oeuvre and artistic legacy.

View a selection of Matisse’s art here.

Further Reading

Delectorskaya, Lydia. With Apparent Ease. Trans. Olga Tourkoff. Paris: Adrien Maeght, 1986.

Flam, Jack D. Matisse, The Man and His Art, 1869-1918. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986.

Gilot, Françoise. Matisse and Picasso. A Friendship in Art. New York: Doubleday, 1990.

Soeur Jacques-Marie. La Chapelle de Vence. Paris: Grégoire Gardette, 1992.

Spurling, Hilary. Matisse the Master. A Life of Henri Matisse: The Conquest of Colour, 1909-1954. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 2005

———–. The Unknown Matisse. A Life of Henri Matisse: The Early Years, 1869-1908. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1998

Chapter Eight, Coming Soon…

Arthur Hoyle (www.arthurhoyle.com) is the author of The Unknown Henry Miller: A Seeker in Big Sur and Mavericks, Mystics, and Misfits: Americans Against the Grain. He reviews biography for the New York Journal of Books. His Substack newsletter Off the Cuff offers periodic commentary on the American cultural scene. Subscribe at https://arthurhoyle.substack.com.