Henri Matisse

Private Collection, Europe (acquired in the 1940s)

Thence by descent

Matisse painted Le Pont, a splendid depiction of Pont Saint-Michel, from the window of his studio located at 19 quai St-Michel in Paris which he rented from 1895-1907, and again in 1913. Pont Saint-Michel was named after the nearby chapel of Saint-Michel and links the Place-Saint-Michel on the left bank of the Seine to the Île de la Cité. Originally constructed in 1378, the medieval bridge was rebuilt several times, most recently in 1857. Matisse painted a series of works from his studio window featuring Pont Saint-Michel of which the present work is the most boldly colored. Other versions from this series reside in the permanent collections of institutions such as the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Phillips Collection in Washington D.C., and Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

The year this work was completed marks a turning point in the artist's career and his decisive shift towards Fauvism. Le Pont demonstrates the colorful direction that Matisse's art would take over the course of the next decade and the influence of his style on the German Expressionist painters only a few years later. As described by John Elderfield in the Matisse Retrospective catalogue, "During an extended stay in Corsica and Toulouse in 1898-1899, he produced an important group of paintings in high key, arbitrary colors and with un-naturalistically broken or atomized forms. The still lifes in particular are constructed purely from the relationships between colors, whose descriptive function is only summarily indicated. These 'proto-fauve' paintings suddenly reveal the nature of Matisse's genius as a colorist: his using color not to imitate light, but to create it." (J. Elderfield, Henri Matisse, A Retrospective, New York, 1992, p. 81).