L'écorché d'après Puget

When Matisse executed, in 1903, this freely interpreted copy after an écorché, a sculpture of a flayed man that revealed the figure's musculature, the original sculpture, which measured 10 inches in height, was believed to have been by Michelangelo. It has been subsequently ascribed to the great French baroque sculpture Pierre Puget (1620-1694), who probably based his version on a Renaissance Florentine sculpture he saw during his travels in Italy. Cézanne also owned a plaster copy of this early écorché, which he depicted in two paintings, the first, a study of the cast by itself done circa 1892 (Rewald, no. 785), and the second in the background of the well-known Nature morte avec l'amour en plâtre, circa 1895 (Rewald, no. 786), which features a copy of Puget's Cupid. Matisse likewise included a plaster copy of the écorché in two paintings done in 1911, Interiéur avec aubergines (coll. Musée de Peinture et Sculpture, Grenoble), and Nature morte avec aubergines (Private Coll.). Both Cézanne and Matisse admired Michelangelo and Puget for their expressive shaping of sculptural form (see lot to lot 103, in May 5th Impressionist and Modern Works on Paper sale). Matisse wrote in his Notes of a Painter, 1908, his first published essay, "When we go into the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sculpture rooms at the Louvre and look, for example, at a Puget, we can see that the expression is forced and exaggerated to the point of being disquieting" (reprinted in J. Flam, ed., Matisse on Art, Berkeley, 1995, p. 39).