Aside from a few initial drypoints in 1900-03 his first foray into printmaking was in 1906 when he sought out the venerable printer Auguste Clot. Clot was renowned for working with the painterly insights but novice printmaking skills of artists such as Pierre Bonnard, Paul Cézanne and Edouard Vuillard. With these artists Clot established lithography’s reputation as a medium well suited for the new painters emerging in the last decades of the nineteenth century. The result was a series of twelve lithographic nudes that ruffled feathers in Paris but positively scandalized New York when they were shown at the Alfred Stieglitz Gallery. The art critic of the New York Evening Mail wrote that the show included ‘some female figures that are of an ugliness that is most appalling and haunting, and that seem to condemn this man’s brain to the limbo of artistic degeneration.’ (Quoted in Susan Lambert, Matisse Lithographs, Universe Books, New York, 1982).

These prints, apart from one, are either heads of women, or full figures drawn standing, seated or crouching. The poses are somewhat unflattering, even distorted, and remind one of his sculpture more than his painting. Drawn with an energetic line, at times jagged, at times fluid, they reflect the same untamed expressiveness of his paintings that shocked the public at the Salon d’Automne of 1905. They certainly showed little concern for the tastes of the marketplace, and the intention seems to have been to bring the viewer into the studio, to experience the artist at work in what he implies to be a single modelling session.

After this intense burst of activity Matisse lost interest in printmaking until 1913-14 when, prompted by a desire to assist friends and relatives from his hometown who had been deported to a prison camp in Germany in the early stages of the war, he turned to printmaking. Within a few short months he produced nine or ten lithographs, at least fourteen monotypes and no fewer than fifty etchings, his first cumulatively significant body of work as a graphic artist. By this means he generated sufficient income to send a series of weekly relief parcels to the camp. A letter included in a package of prints he sent to his patron, the collector and fashion designer Jacques Doucet, concluded: ‘I thank you in the name of my unfortunate compatriots—deprived of everything, dying of hunger, often beaten (my brother—among them—wrote me of it) and without news of the loved ones who remain in the invaded area. I am sending you the engravings in question; I will find no better recompense for my talent than if it can contribute to lessening their suffering. ‘ (Quoted in Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913-1917, Stephanie D'Alessandro and John Elderfield, Yale University Press, 2011.)

The etchings of the same year are much more intimate than the lithographs or monotypes, a distinction that he was to maintain throughout his career. They are a brilliant sequence of quick and informal characterisations, mostly of friends and family and, like all of his etchings, distinguished by their simplicity. Individual features are reduced to vivid details, and often the contours of the face fill the rectangular frame of the copper plate. He installed a press in his studio to enable him to work on them at any time, an arrangement that recalls the early printmaking experiments of Degas and Pissarro, which were intimate and isolated from the market.

The nature of etching encouraged Matisse to take a spare, spontaneous approach using simplified linear drawing. The etching line was fluid and nuanced, like a pen line, and he quickly learned to vary the pressure he applied to the etching needle to control the weight and width of the line as he drew. He used plates of varying dimensions and proportions; skinny verticals and long rectangles and squares. He often cropped the image, always conscious of the placement of the composition within the overall dimensions of the plate.