Lot Essay
Wanda de Gubriant has confirmed the authenticity of this drawing.
Matisse had been living in a rented apartment at 1, place Charles-Flix in Nice since the fall of 1921. It had two rooms he used as studios but was otherwise quite small. At the end of 1926 he moved to the top floor and took over two apartments, which gave him additional studio and living space. The central feature was a large triple-window (seen in the upper part of the present drawing) with a southern exposure overlooking the Promenade des Anglais and the Baie des Anges. Matisse used this light, airy room as his primary studio.
In the latter half of the 1920's Matisse's drawings underwent a transition from a concentration of tonal charcoal shading to pure line. Unshaded ink drawings became more frequent, as do fine, linear pencil drawings, and by the 1930s these account numerically for the vast majority of his drawings output:
"Compared to ink drawings of the early 1920s, the new ink drawings tend, by and large, to eschew shading, and when it appears, it usually does so to produce areas of decorative pattern rather than to model in the round. Line alone gives weight to figures and participates in the ornamentation provided by similarly arabesque treatment of the setting. The sheet is often filled right out to the edges to form a single patterned unit within which the identities of the figures are obscured. In drawings of this kind, the decorative function of the figure subsumes its human identity." (J. Elderfield, The Drawings of Henri Matisse, exh. cat., Arts Council of Great Britian, London, 1984, p. 91)
Matisse had been living in a rented apartment at 1, place Charles-Flix in Nice since the fall of 1921. It had two rooms he used as studios but was otherwise quite small. At the end of 1926 he moved to the top floor and took over two apartments, which gave him additional studio and living space. The central feature was a large triple-window (seen in the upper part of the present drawing) with a southern exposure overlooking the Promenade des Anglais and the Baie des Anges. Matisse used this light, airy room as his primary studio.
In the latter half of the 1920's Matisse's drawings underwent a transition from a concentration of tonal charcoal shading to pure line. Unshaded ink drawings became more frequent, as do fine, linear pencil drawings, and by the 1930s these account numerically for the vast majority of his drawings output:
"Compared to ink drawings of the early 1920s, the new ink drawings tend, by and large, to eschew shading, and when it appears, it usually does so to produce areas of decorative pattern rather than to model in the round. Line alone gives weight to figures and participates in the ornamentation provided by similarly arabesque treatment of the setting. The sheet is often filled right out to the edges to form a single patterned unit within which the identities of the figures are obscured. In drawings of this kind, the decorative function of the figure subsumes its human identity." (J. Elderfield, The Drawings of Henri Matisse, exh. cat., Arts Council of Great Britian, London, 1984, p. 91)