A collector’s guide to Henri Matisse

The artist’s beginnings

Henri Matisse was born in 1869 in the small town of Bohain-en-Vermandois, in the flatlands of northeastern France. Its skies were grey, its houses of dull brick, and its fields devoted to acre after acre of sugar beet. According to Matisse’s biographer, Hilary Spurling, his whole career represented a rejection of that early sobriety and ‘a flight towards the brilliant light’.

Early Fauve paintings

Matisse’s earliest works, from the 1890s, were in the tradition of Realism and naturalism. His first creative breakthrough came in the middle of the next decade, at the vanguard of Fauvism. Matisse rejected his early influences and turned to a wild use of colour as a means of expressing his feelings about the world.

Among Matisse’s great works in this style is a 1905 portrait of his wife, Amélie, Woman with a Hat (now part of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art collection). Another is a still life from 1907, Les Pivoines (sold for $19.1 million at Christie’s in New York in 2012), in which Matisse flattened the composition, with the wall behind the vase of peonies all but dematerialising into a cascade of colour.

This period is recognised as a transformative one, both for Matisse and for all Western art. Examples of his Fauve paintings rarely come to market, so there is a great deal of interest when they do.

‘Textiles were in his blood’

Many of Matisse’s ancestors had been weavers. As Spurling put it, ‘textiles were in his blood’. He collected Persian carpets, Arab embroideries and African wall hangings throughout his life, his studio becoming a treasure trove of exotic and vibrant pattern.

The collection was practical — he called it his ‘working library’ — with textiles appearing and reappearing in a large number of his paintings, drawings and prints. They also contributed to a key development in Matisse’s art in the run-up to the First World War, when he rejected the old laws of perspective and three-dimensional illusion in favour of internalised, purely pictorial spaces.

Again, the most radical paintings of this period rarely appear for sale. They were assiduously purchased from Matisse by the Russian businessman Sergei Shchukin, whose art collection was later divided between the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow and the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg. In 2016-17, the Fondation Louis Vuitton paid tribute to him as one of the greatest art patrons of the early 20th century in the exhibition Icons of Modern Art. The Shchukin Collection.

The ‘Odalisques’, and comparisons with Picasso

Matisse’s art was often so bold that it drew criticism from his contemporaries. The monumental painting Dance — a 1910 commission by Shchukin, depicting five naked figures with electric-red bodies — was met with jeers and catcalls when shown at the Salon d’Automne in Paris.

‘Without voluptuous pleasure, nothing exists,’ said the artist; and today we associate him with vibrancy, harmony and sensuality. Arguably, no series of work exemplifies these three qualities better than his ‘Odalisques’ from the 1920s and 1930s, when he was living in Nice. Having fled Paris for the French Riviera at the end of the First World War, Matisse began painting exotic-looking women in richly decorated interiors. More often than not, they were in a state of luxurious repose.

In May 2018, one of these canvases — Odalisque couchée aux magnolias (1923) — realised $80,750,000 in the sale of The Collection of Peggy and David Rockefeller at Christie’s in New York, establishing the world-record price for a Matisse at auction. The work depicts one of the artist’s favourite models, the dancer Henriette Darricarrère, relaxing on a chaise longue as Mediterranean sunlight pours into his studio.

Aside from their qualities as artworks in their own right, the Odalisques are also of interest in terms of comparisons between the careers of Matisse and Picasso. After the death of Matisse, in 1954 aged 84, Picasso claimed that the older artist ‘left his Odalisques to me, as a legacy’ — and duly started a set of Odalisques of his own.

Other examples by Matisse that have sold at Christie’s include Odalisque, mains dans le dos (1923) and L’Odalisque, harmonie bleue (1937) — which itself set a world record for the artist at auction, when it achieved $33.6 million in 2007.

Matisse the printmaker

Matisse is highly regarded as a painter, of course, but he was also a dedicated draughtsman and printmaker, producing more than 800 prints in a range of techniques, from linocuts and woodcuts to lithography and etching. Many of Matisse’s prints, particularly his lithographs, feature the same lavish detail as his paintings, while his etchings demonstrate his ability to convey a subject in just a few lines. Though praised for his mastery of colour, Matisse was just as expressive and versatile in black and white.

He also never stopped learning new printing techniques. He made his first aquatints in the early 1930s at the age of 62, and did not engage seriously with the medium until his late seventies. With their bold black lines against fields of unprinted white paper, these works look strikingly like his brush and India ink paintings.

There is a strong market for Matisse’s prints — led by screenprints and pochoirs (stencils), but also including aquatints, lithographs and etchings.

Matisse’s drawings: ‘the purest and most direct translation’ of his creativity

Matisse produced several thousand drawings over the course of his career. What typified these were lines that managed to be classically simple yet dreamily unfettered at the same time.

The artist himself claimed that drawing was ‘the purest and most direct translation’ of his creativity. According to the New York Times art critic John Russell, the Frenchman was ‘among the most seductive draughtsmen who ever lived’.

The drawings also offer, for many, the best way into the Matisse market, with works at a wide range of price points. Some drawings fetch prices of a few thousand dollars, others more than a million.

Generally, the highest prices are commanded by Matisse’s charcoal drawings from the 1930s, such as his 1939 study for La Dormeuse (Le Rêve), as well as his works made with sweeping lines of India ink. It is impossible to appreciate Matisse fully as an artist without paying close attention to his drawings.

The cut-outs: ‘drawing with scissors’

Drawing was also at the heart of the last, stunning advance of Matisse’s career: his ‘cut-outs’. These consisted of painted sheets of paper, which he cut (with scissors) into forms of varying shapes and sizes, and then arranged into lively compositions.

In the process, he invented a new artistic medium — though, in a sense, it was just the conclusion of Matisse’s long quest to find a perfect balance between the formal elements of line and colour. He described the process of making cut-outs as both ‘drawing with scissors’ and ‘cutting directly into colour’.

These works dominated Matisse’s art in the final 15 years of his life. They appear at auction less regularly than his drawings, but tend to fetch prices at the high end of the works-on-paper market when they do — especially those from the 1950s.

In 2014, the cut-outs were the subject of a blockbuster exhibition at London’s Tate Modern, which later transferred to MoMA in New York. A new Matisse exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris also focuses on this final period of his career, which the artist called his ‘second life’. Covering the years 1941-54, it features more than 230 works, many of them from the extensive collection held by the currently shuttered Centre Pompidou.

Henri Matisse: Tracer le lien, oeuvres sur papier de la Fondation Pierre et Tana Matisse is live for bidding from 8 to 17 April 2026, and on view 9-16 Appril at Christie’s in Paris

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