Henri Matisse

Henri Manguin (acquired directly from the artist in exchange for one of Manguin’s own works)
Pierre Manguin (by descent from the above)
Marlborough Fine Art (acquired in the 1960s)
Galerie d’Art Moderne, Basel
Galerie Rosenberg, Zurich
Lefevre Gallery, London
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1966

London, Marlborough Fine Art Ltd., Exhibition of French Masters of the 19th & 20th Centuries, 1950, no. 32

Guy-Patrice & Michel Dauberville, Henri Matisse chez Bernheim-Jeune, Paris, 1995, vol. I, no. 29, illustrated p. 329

Executed on a prepared board, the board is stable and there do not appear to be any retouchings visible under UV light. There are two very faint raised vertical lines to the right half of the board probably inherent to the board and visible only in a raked light. This work appears to be in very good original condition.
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Dating from the period immediately preceding the development of his Fauvist style, Les boules de neige is a remarkable illustration of the core principles of colour and compositional structure on which Henri Matisse would build the foundation of his art. One of the precocious young artists to draw inspiration from the paintings of Paul Cézanne at the turn of the twentieth century, in 1899—just a year before he executed the present work—Matisse purchased a painting of bathers by Cézanne, now in the Musée du Petit Palais in Paris, which was to be his most prized possession and source of creative inspiration. The present work demonstrates the lessons in perspectival manipulation, light and shadow that Matisse internalised after seeing the elder artist's works. Speaking of Cézanne in 1925, Matisse noted: 'If only you knew the moral strength, the encouragement that his remarkable example gave me all my life! In moments of doubt, when I was still searching for myself, frightened sometimes by my discoveries, I thought: "If Cézanne is right, I am right", because I knew Cézanne had made no mistake. There are, you see, constructional laws in the work of Cézanne which are useful to a young painter. He had, among his great virtues, this merit of wanting the tones to be forces in a painting, giving the highest mission to his painting” (in an interview with Jacques Guenne, 1925, reprinted in Jack Flam, Matisse on Art, New York, 1978, p. 55)

Les Boules de neige represents the pinnacle of Matisse's tireless aesthetic exploration of the still-life genre, which had been a major preoccupation of the artist since as early as the 1850s, during this critical period of transition and consolidation. It depicts an arrangement of several small vases each with a lush bloom of boule de neige (or Guelder-Rose, in English). Matisse had begun to include cut blossoms in his still-lifes the previous summer, a procedure that provided him with a broad range of organic shapes and patterns that could be played against the solid, geometric forms of vases, tables, and other inanimate objects. In Les Boules de neige, the luscious impasto of the flower heads retain a sense of three-dimensionality, bursting out of the vases with all the vigour of spring, while the table recedes unambiguously into depth and the rear wall is de-materialised into a cascade of colour, freely brushed with vigorous, gestural strokes.