La fenêtre ouverte

Matisse experimented with the theme of the open window as early as 1905, when he painted La fenêtre ouverte (fig. 1). In the present work, he returns to what had become a favorite subject; an interior, brightly lit and seen through half-open shutters. Drawn in his room at the Hôtel Méditeranée in Nice, this studio was an expansive and fertile ground for Matisse's artistic explorations. As Jack Cowart has noted, "The rooms were decorated in nineteenth-century Italianate styles. Matisse would artistically enlarge this hotel, its presence, its rooms, and the views well beyond their literal dimensions; he would push his art and the rhythms of its surfaces to record his new levels of excited observation" (J. Cowart, Henri Matisse, The Early Years in Nice, 1916-1930, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington. D.C., 1986, p. 26).

As John Elderfield has discussed of the present work:

Here, the mood created by the play of light on the panes and frame of the window becomes the main subject of the picture. The atmosphere of indolence and nostalgia is enhanced by the emptiness of the foreground and the deep perspective created by the pattern of light and shadow on the floor. The half-open shutters protect the interior from the invasion of the outside world, but at the same time allow limited contact with it. (J. Elderfield, op. cit., exh. cat., 1984-1985, p. 267)

(fig. 1) Henri Matisse, La fenêtre ouverte, 1905.
Private collection.