Henri Matisse

Emile Laffargue, Paris (acquired in the 1930s)
Thence by descent to the present owner

Guy-Patrice & Michel Dauberville, Matisse, Henri Matisse chez Bernheim-Jeune, Paris, 1995, vol. 1, p. 173, photograph of the 1958 Matisse exhibition at Bernheim-Jeune, showing the present work

Daring in its palette and expressive brushstroke, Bosquet au bord de la Garonne is a rare example of Matisse's early style. Such landscapes, painted when Matisse was already 30, anticipate the arrival of his Fauve period.

In 1900, Matisse joined Giuseppe di Camillo's academy in Montparnasse, under the tutelage of Eugène Carrière. Boudot-Lamotte, a fellow pupil, would later recall Matisse's works of this time as 'blazing with pure colour and coordinated by great strokes of ultramarine, the work of a true colourist' (quoted in Hilary Spurling, The Unknown Matisse, New York, 1998, p. 196). 

Boudot-Lamotte would introduce Matisse to another of Carrière's pupils, André Derain. Both fervent admirers of Cézanne, Matisse and Derain were driven by a refusal to conform with traditional, representational uses of colour. The example of Edvard Munch, whose work had been exhibited in Paris since the 1890s, offered an important impetus here. Their desire to explore the expressive potential of pigment would culminate in the explosive Fauve paintings executed in Collioure during the summer of 1905