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• Wooden Horse Stone

• Henri Matisse

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• Pierre au cheval de bois, 1904
  Oil on canvas
  
  In Pierre au cheval de bois, Matisse depicted his youngest child Pierre, who was then almost four years old, holding his favorite toy, a wooden horse he called 'Bidouille.' It is a disarmingly pleasant domestic scene, almost like a casual snapshot. The artist had been hitherto little disposed to revealing his inner feelings in his canvases, but here he expresses surprisingly personal emotions of joy and contentment in the simple pleasures of family and home. Indeed, this painting tells of the fortunate outcome of an extraordinary story. In 1902-1903 Matisse overcame, through sheer strength of will, an almost ruinous string of adversities, and in 1904 he set forth to undertake a new phase in his art. Painted in early 1904, Pierre au cheval de bois shows Matisse poised near the brink of the radical breakthrough, in the following year, would result in his revolutionary Fauve canvases.
  
  Alfred H. Barr, Jr., called the years 1902-1903 Matisse's "dark" period (in Matisse: His Art and his Public, New York, 1951, p. 49), in reference to the conservatively somber tonalities that he adopted in his paintings during this period, in an effort to make them more attractive to buyers. With the 1998 publication of Hilary Spurling's The Unknown Matisse (op. cit.), we now have a more thorough understanding of the personal and family difficulties that the artist faced during this period, which proved to be very "dark" indeed. In May 1902 the Humbert scandal broke--Frédéric and Thérèse Humbert had for years leveraged their extensive business dealings against a non-existent legacy, and fled Paris only hours before their fraud was uncovered. Armand and Catherine Parayre, the parents of the artist's wife Amélie, both worked for the Humberts, and were implicated in the scandal. Their home, Amélie's hat-shop and Matisse's studio were searched by police. When the Humberts were finally detained that December in Madrid, Armand Parayre, then 60 years old, was also arrested and imprisoned for more than a month. Amélie's health suffered and she was forced to close her business, from which the artist's family derived necessary income. Matisse was forced to take the role of family spokesman and defender. Finally, in early 1903, in order to escape from unrelenting public scorn, and to lighten the burden of stress and financial hardship that had overwhelmed his family, Matisse closed his Paris studio at 19, quai de Saint-Michel and took Amélie and their three children to live with his parents in Bohain-en-Vermandois, in his native region in northeast France. This desperate move marked the "low point" in their tibulations (ibid., p. 250).
  
  Later that spring Matisse moved to a house in Bohain away from this parents, who increasingly disapproved of his choice of a career and criticized his inability to properly support his family. Here he made his studio, which he depicted in one of his best works of this period, L'atelier sous les toits (fig. 1). "Dark" it was--Barr described it "as original in conception as it is disconsolate in atmosphere (op. cit., p. 50). In July they moved to Lesquielles-Saint Germain, some distance away. On 15 July Matisse wrote to Simon Bussy, a friend and painter, "My work more or less satisfies me. I am aware of continual real progress, more suppleness of execution than in the earlier studies, and a return to the soft harmonies and close values that will certainly be better received by collectors. The various cares, small and large, more small than large, which life has already given me a good share of, and the responsibility that I've decided courageously to accept, combined with the pittance that our calling brings in, had almost made me decide to quit painting altogether" (quoted in J. Flam, ed. Matisse: A Retrospective, New York, 1988, p. 41).
  
  Spurling has estimated that during this period Matisse counted on supporting his family with an income that amounted to little more than the yearly wages of a local day laborer.

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Other paintings by Henri Matisse:

Still Life with Fruit and Bottle

A Street in Arcueil

Naked in an Armchair

Girl's Torso