拍品專文
The present work is part of a series of four paintings and at least seventeen drawings which Matisse executed in Nice during the winter of 1918 and the spring of 1919, depicting an eighteen-year-old model named Antoinette Arnoux. In each picture, Antoinette is shown wearing an elaborate hat which Matisse himself fabricated, its white plumes extending over her forehead and threatening in certain versions to overtake her face. Discussing the origins of this hat, one critic recalled,
"I asked him," Margaret Scolari noted after a conversation with
Matisse as they stood before White Plumes in his Paris
retrospective of 1931, "I asked him where in creation he'd got that hat, so he laughed welcoming the question and said that he'd made it himself. He bought the straw foundation and the feathers and the
black ribbon and put it together on the model's head. He said it
had too much black ribbon so that he had to stuff it into the crown with dozens of pins." (quoted in A. Barr, op. cit., p. 206)
Matisse depicts Antoinette in a wide range of moods and characterizations in the paintings and drawings of the plumed hat series, almost as if she were an actress assuming various roles. In the version in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., for example, Antoinette appears vulnerable and demure; in the Minneapolis Institute of Arts's picture, she looks sophisticated and cold; and in the present work, she is langorous and seductive, her eyelids heavy and her diaphanous robes falling open to reveal her bare torso. The entire series was executed while Matisse was living at the Hôtel Méditerranée, in a room with a wide sweep of windows which opened onto the baie des Anges; yet more so than any other picture in the group, the present one faithfully records the diffuse southern light which flooded the Hôtel, the golden palette of the painting recalling a statement which Matisse made to Charles Camoin in 1918:
It's like a paradise you have no right to analyze, but you are a
painter, for God's sake! ...A light so soft and tender, despite its brilliance.... I often break my back trying to paint [it]. (quoted in J. Flam, Henri Matisse: A Retrospective, New York, 1988, p.
170)
"I asked him," Margaret Scolari noted after a conversation with
Matisse as they stood before White Plumes in his Paris
retrospective of 1931, "I asked him where in creation he'd got that hat, so he laughed welcoming the question and said that he'd made it himself. He bought the straw foundation and the feathers and the
black ribbon and put it together on the model's head. He said it
had too much black ribbon so that he had to stuff it into the crown with dozens of pins." (quoted in A. Barr, op. cit., p. 206)
Matisse depicts Antoinette in a wide range of moods and characterizations in the paintings and drawings of the plumed hat series, almost as if she were an actress assuming various roles. In the version in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., for example, Antoinette appears vulnerable and demure; in the Minneapolis Institute of Arts's picture, she looks sophisticated and cold; and in the present work, she is langorous and seductive, her eyelids heavy and her diaphanous robes falling open to reveal her bare torso. The entire series was executed while Matisse was living at the Hôtel Méditerranée, in a room with a wide sweep of windows which opened onto the baie des Anges; yet more so than any other picture in the group, the present one faithfully records the diffuse southern light which flooded the Hôtel, the golden palette of the painting recalling a statement which Matisse made to Charles Camoin in 1918:
It's like a paradise you have no right to analyze, but you are a
painter, for God's sake! ...A light so soft and tender, despite its brilliance.... I often break my back trying to paint [it]. (quoted in J. Flam, Henri Matisse: A Retrospective, New York, 1988, p.
170)