Galerie Daniel Malingue, Paris
Acquired from the above 

Lydia Delectorskaya, Henri Matisse… Contre vents et marées… Peinture et livres illustrés de 1939 à 1943, Paris, 1996, illustrated p. 537

Executed on white laid paper, not laid down, supported at the edges to a sheet of paper with Japan paper. There are artist's pinholes in the top two corners. There are two repaired tears in the upper and lower parts of the right edge. Apart from some minor surface dirt to the extreme edges and some faint yellowing to the sheet, this work is in very good condition.
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Although relatively little is known about Michaela, she evidently sat for Matisse on a number of occasions in the early 1940s (see fig. 1). Among the canvases she inspired is the important 1943 painting Michaela which seems directly related to the present drawing. In both works the model is pictured sitting upright, looking directly out at the viewer with an inscrutable gaze. The oil was exhibited by Matisse at the Palais de la Méditerranée in 1945 where it met with outrage, causing Pierre Matisse to write reassuringly to his father, "The dose of vitality in the picture Michaela is phenomenal… One seems to recharge one’s batteries in the presence of a painting like that," (quoted in Hilary Spurting, Matisse, The Master, London, 2005, p. 441).

A sense of this vitality is captured in the fluidity of the drawn lines of the present work. These lines are then softened by the blended charcoal that Matisse used to create a sense of depth and three-dimensionality to his drawings. Matisse had perfected this use of the estompe technique in the 1930s and although by 1943 he was already beginning to work on the cut-outs that would occupy him during the final decade of his life, the present work reflects the supreme importance of charcoal drawings as part of his creative process. John Elderfield quotes Matisse’s 1939 essay "Notes of a Painter on his Drawing" to explain how the artist’s charcoal drawings "allowed him to study the character of the model, the human expression, the quality of surrounding light, atmosphere and so on. Only then, he [Matisse] wrote, can I with a clear mind and without hesitation give free rein to my pen. Then I feel clearly that my emotion is expressed in plastic writing" (John Elderfield, The Drawings of Henri Matisse, London, 1984, p. 122).