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• Woman in the Armchair

• Henri Matisse

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• Femme au fauteuil, 1919
  Oil on canvas
  
  Henri Matisse painted Femme au fauteuil in 1919. This picture dates from the period when Nice, in the South of France was beginning to exert its pull and fascination upon him; he would increasingly make his home during the coming decades. Femme au fauteuil shows a woman sitting in elegant, billowing clothes in a chair, a pool of radiance within the composition, all the more so because of the browns that dominate the background. This reveals Matisse's engagement with the light of the South, which had drawn him there and which came to have such a transformative effect on his paintings and drawings. Already in Femme au fauteuil, painted only a couple of years after his first visit to Nice, the outlines that Matisse had formerly used to thrust colours into bolder relief have been dissolved in order to give a subtler sense of colour and, crucially, a more modulated sense of volume and space.
  
  Comparison with several of Matisse's other pictures of this period reveals that the model for Femme au fauteuil appears to be Antoinette Arnoud; those pictures often share the same gaze that is shown here, the dark eyes fixed on the artist and therefore engaging the viewer, and indeed one picture of the same title from the same year shows her in an almost identical pose in the same chair, decorated with its criss-cross yellow pattern, but instead wearing an open chiffon blouse and a skirt wrapped around her. Antoinette had been working as a model for several artists at the time that she first came to pose for Matisse the previous year; her combination of elegance and beauty made the svelte nineteen year-old a perfect match for him, and she remained a key figure in his art for two fruitful years before she found another, higher-paying job elsewhere. Hilary Spurling has suggested that Renoir, for whom she also posed, may have seen her aptness and recommended her to the younger painter. Spurling writes that she was, 'pale, slender and supple with a quintessentially urban, indoor chic and the kind of responsive intelligence Matisse required at this point from a model' (H. Spurling, Matisse the Master: A Life of Henri Matisse: The Conquest of Colour, 1909-1954, London, 2005, p. 223).
  
  Antoinette began to sit regularly, not least serving as a substitute for Matisse's daughter Marguerite, whose ill health meant that she was elsewhere and unable to sit. Antoinette's collaboration with Matisse - which would pave the way for his fruitful working relationships with a string of later models including Henriette Darricarrère and, later, Lydia Delektorskaya - resulted in a string of important drawings and paintings that included images of her with a plumed hat made by the artist himself; Antoinette appears in such pictures as Femme vêtue à l'orientale in the Kelvingrove Museum, Glasgow, La liseuse distraite in the Tate, London, Les plumes blanches in the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and Grand intérieur, Nice in the Art Institute of Chicago.
  
  Antoinette's intelligence as a model catalysed Matisse's continued artistic explorations: 'At the end of this first postwar season in Nice, he told the Scandinavian critic Ragnar Hoppe that he was trying to reconquer ground he had been forced to give up for the sake of simplicity and concentration. Now he hoped to find a way or retaining clarity, concision and force without sacrificing volume, spatial depth, the individual character and texture of fur, feathers, fluff, fabric or flowers' (ibid., p. 225). That sense of clarity, which is clear in Femme au fauteuil, marks a stark contrast to many of Matisse's works from the previous few years, which often involved planes of colour and faces composed of geometric forms, for instance his 1917 portrait of Auguste Pellerin now in the Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris, or his picture of a piano lesson from the previous year. In Femme au fauteuil, that stylisation has been banished in favour of a more easily, and enjoyably, legible picture; however, the artist has not forsaken his investigations. Instead, he has used more naturalistic devices in order to capture the sense of space within the room, in part through the presence of the sitter and in part through the modulation of forms and colour with which she is composed, an effect that is heightened by the contrast with the broad planes of colour of the background.
  
  In this way, Matisse's paintings from this period can be seen as a parallel development to the Neo-Classicism that was becoming increasingly prominent in the works of his great artistic rival Pablo Picasso. Over recent years, several exhibitions have been dedicated to investigating the resonances that the work of the two artists had upon each other; however, the first joint exhibition of their works had been organised in 1918, only the year before Femme au fauteuil was painted, in the gallery of the dealer Paul Guillaume. As has been shown through the juxtaposition of many of the works of both artists from throughout their careers, both artists spent most of the first half of the Twentieth Century painfully aware of the various advances and stylistic developments being pioneered or embraced by the other. Looking back on his days in the Bateau Lavoir, Picasso would tell Pierre Daix: 'You have got to be able to picture side by side everything Matisse and I were doing at that time. No one has ever looked at Matisse's painting more carefully than I; and no one has looked at mine more carefully than he' (Picasso, quoted in J. Golding, 'Introduction', pp. 13-24, Cowling et al. (ed.), Matisse Picasso, exh. cat., London, 2002, p. 13).
  
  This appears to have remained the case at the end of the First World War, when both artists reached a stage at which they were able to synthesise their desires to capture ideas of space, form and emotion within pictorial form in a clear, open manner, as is evident in Femme au fauteuil. Indeed, Picasso was focussing in particular on his wife, Olga Khokhlova, in his works of this period, often showing her seated in poses reminiscent of Femme au fauteuil. In their shared quest forr clarity, both artists were able to prefigure the Rappel à l'ordre that would come to characterise so much of the avant garde during the the 1920s. It is a mark of the success that Matisse had in this that viewers at the time believed that the women he was painting were his mistresses, that he was depicting a world of hedonism and sensuality in which he indulged; instead, these were models, confections, scenes redolent of that sensuousness yet which had been created without the compromise of the artist himself. Indeed, Matisse's devotion to his artistic investigations during this time led to a period of near self-denial: he was ensconced within his room in the H?tel Méditerranée, referring to himself as the 'hermit of the promenade des Anglais' (Matisse, quoted in ibid., p. 226). Interestingly, despite the Southern feel to many of his pictures of Antoinette, their sensuality and their treatment of the winter light, several appear to have been painted, or at least completed, at his home in Issy-les-Moulineaux, in the outskirts of Paris, where he spent the summer. These works nevertheless display the influence of the South and the advances that he had made there, conjuring that rarefied atmosphere of sensuality.

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Other paintings by Henri Matisse:

The Little House

Still Life with Oranges

Woman by the Window 1919

Seated Figure, Striped Carpet