Henri Matisse

Jacques Doucet, Paris
Charles Vildrac, Paris
Private Collection, Paris
Galerie Schmidt, Paris
Private Collection, Paris, since 1982

Guy-Patrice & Michel Dauberville, Matisse, vol. II, Paris, 1995, no. 412, illustrated p. 907

Work is in good condition. Canvas is lined. Surface has been recently cleaned. There has been some slight flattening to the impasto in the white highlights. Under UV light: there are some scattered spots of inpainting in central register of the clouds, a few strokes below and left of the boat on beach, and three pin-head size dots to left of the large figure. There are also a few strokes of inpainting here and there along the edges particularly at lower right corner probably to address prior frame abrasion. A layer of varnish fluoresces somewhat unevenly. Otherwise fine. Colors: The clouds are lighter and brighter overall, there are more pink highlights in the clouds and the ground on the right is pinker than in the catalogue illustration.
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Matisse took his wife and daughter to the coastal resort of Étretat on the Normandy coast in 1920, so that his daughter could recover from an operation. The hotel room on the beach front provided an ideal subject for a series of paintings of his room of the type that would become so familiar in his later Nice period, but Matisse also ventured out to paint a series of grand cliff and beach scenes. This subject had been a source of inspiration to an earlier generation of Impressionists such as Boudin and Monet. Yet perhaps more importantly for Matisse, Courbet had also painted the scene, and it was the 19th century artist who was the greater influence on Matisse in the earlier part of his career. Matisse owned several works by the artist, and his influence is clearly discernable in Matisse's earlier landscapes.

While at Étretat, Matisse painted a few landscapes as in the present work, and then also varied the formula by making the landscape the setting for still lives featuring a variety of marine life. As he wrote in a letter to a friend at this time: "I've been at Étretat for two weeks now amid green-topped white cliffs beside a tender blue and turquoise green sea from which I can see emerging superb creamy-white turbots, iron-grey dogfish, lesser spotted dogfish and skate all over the harbour" (quoted in Hilary Spurling, Matisse The Master, London, 2005, p. 236). His fascination with the marine life reflects the work of his early career; Matisse was initially a realist painter of still lives, inspired by artists such as de Heem, Chardin and Kalf. His stay in Étretat can thus be seen as Matisse's last encounter with northern realism, and these works lay the ghosts of his 19th century predecessors to rest before he moved to the sunnier climes of Nice.

Fig. 1  Gustave Courbet, La Falaise d'Étretat après l'orage, 1869, oil on canvas, Musée d'Orsay, Paris 

Fig. 2  Claude Monet, La Pointe de La Hève, Sainte-Adresse, 1864, oil on canvas, National Gallery, London