Henri Matisse

Matisse believed that his drawings were a means of expressing the intimate feelings and emotions of those whom he depicted. Over the years he formed close relationships with many of his models and wished to express their personalities in his pictures.  In this drawing from 1938 he depicts two young women whom he evidently admired, given the smiles on their faces. 

Writing about his drawings and the models who sat for them, Matisse said, "My models, human figures, are never just 'extras' in an interior.  They are the principal theme in my work.  I depend entirely on my model, whom I observe at liberty, and then I decide on the pose which best suits her nature.  When I take a new model, I intuit the pose that will best suit her from her un-selfconscious attitudes of repose, and then I become the slave of that pose.  I often keep those girls several years, until my interest is exhausted.  My plastic signs probably express their souls (a word I dislike), which interests me subconsciously, or what else is there?  Their forms are not always perfect, but they are expressive.  The emotional interest aroused in me by them does not appear particularly in the representation of their bodies, but often rather in the lines or the special values distributed over the whole canvas or paper, which form its complete orchestration, its architecture.  But not everyone perceives this.  It is perhaps sublimated sensual pleasure, which may not yet be perceived by everyone" (Ernst Gerhard Güse, Henri Matisse, Drawings and Sculpture, Munich, 1991, p. 22).