Marguerite Duthuit-Matisse, Paris (inherited from the artist)
Galerie Art Moderne, Paris
🅰Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1979

Although Matisse drew in pen and ink throughout his career, he executed very few broadly-rendered ink drawings after his Fauve period until the 1940’s, when he turned to brush and ink to create a series of drawings that equal the richly shaded charcoal drawings of the same period. The Fauve drawings are composed of a network of lines and patches of ink that create the effect of abrupt contrasts of light and shade. The brush and ink drawings of the late 1940’s possess a classical discipline, reminiscent of the ancient art of calligraphy, and a refined sense of overall design. The artist fills the entire sheet in grand, gestural strokes of the brush. Pierre Schneider finds the brush drawings of this period interchangeable with the paintings of the same name, “which only goes to prove they have the same identity. These large dazzling black and white sheets of paper are Matisse’s last paintings’’ (Pierre Schneider, Matisse, New York, 1984, p. 652-654).