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• Modesty (L'Italienne)

• Henri Matisse

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• La pudeur (L'Italienne), 1906
  Oil on panel
  
  Dating from the height of Henri Matisse's celebrated Fauve period, La pudeur (L'Italienne) is a bold and colourful painting from 1906 that within a short time of completion had been purchased by one of the artist's greatest patrons, Sarah Stein, the sister-in-law of Gertrude and Leo. This picture, then, dates from a crucial pivotal moment in Matisse's career when he had begun to consolidate his use of and indeed love of colour, while also gaining recognition and indeed financial stability through the Steins and, eventually, other admirers and patrons. La pudeur (L'Italienne) shows a woman who appears to be Matisse's wife in an almost classical, contemplative pose, holding a branch of flowers (which gave the picture another of its titles, La branche de fleurs). This deliberate avoidance of a conspicuously modern subject serves to highlight the intense modernity of the manner in which the woman has been depicted, with areas of unmodulated colour that show Matisse at the apogee of his Fauve manner.
  
  Matisse's Fauvism had developed during 1905, most importantly during a holiday he had spent with André Derain at the very South of France, in Collioure, a port to which he would return year after year. There, inspired by the intense light of the pure, untouched landscape, he created a succession of pictures in which he and Derain honed the vivid, intensely colourful style that, when they returned and exhibited their paintings from this trip at the Salon d'Automne, would lead to the critic Louis Vauxcelles to dub them 'Fauves,' or wild beasts. In writing about the pictures at that exhibition, which included the celebrated La femme au chapeau now in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Vauxcelles wrote with guarded enthusiasm:
  
  'M. Matisse is one of the most richly endowed of today's painters. He might have won a facile success; instead he prefers to drive himself, to undertake passionate researches, to force pointillism to greater vibration... But his concern for form suffers' (L. Vauxcelles, quoted in A.H. Barr, Jr., Matisse: His Art and His Public, New York, 1966, p. 63).
  
  Alfred H. Barr speculated that it was in response to this accusation that Matisse painted the portrait of his wife that the Steins would come to nickname La raie verte, or the Green Stripe, a work that had a more solid sense of structure and which now hangs in the Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen; it is this same sense of structure that underpins La pudeur (L'Italienne). The bold areas of colour have taken on a planar quality that was absent in La femme au chapeau. These create a sense of moulded form, of the sculptural and three-dimensional quality of the woman. It is particularly apparent in the areas of the shoulders and arms, where Matisse has managed to conjure a sense of shading despite the intensity of the incandescent palette, sometimes creating an impression of shape through the manipulation of the brushstrokes alone. In this way, Matisse is revealing his continued interest in the work of Cézanne, which he had seen some time earlier and which would come to influence so many artists after the death of the Master of Aix and his posthumous retrospective in 1907.

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Other paintings by Henri Matisse:

The Ilyssus of the Parthenon

Landscape in Collioure

Cross-legged Nude

Woman in Armchair-Woman in Neglect