Henri Matisse

Theodor and Ulla Ahrenberg, Stockholm

Sotheby’s, London, 7 July 1960, lot 24 (consigned by the above)

The Hanover Gallery, London (acquired at the above sale)

Pace Gallery, Boston

Wilfred P. and Rose Cohen, New York (acquired by 1984)

Pat and Irving C. Deal, Dallas (acquired by January 1986)

Acquired from the above on 2 January 1990 by the present owner

Paris, Maison de la Pensée française, Henri Matisse. Chapelle, peinture, dessins, sculptures, 1950, no. 90, p. 24 (dated 1906)

Copenhagen, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Henri Matisse: Skulpturer, Malerier, Farveklip, 1953, no. 24, n.p., illustrated and illustrated on the cover

Helsinki, Taidehalli-Konsthallen; Oslo, Kunstnernes Hus and Rotterdam, Boymans Museum, Henri Matisse, 1954, no. 24, p. 2, illustrated; p. 13 

Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada, Henri Matisse. Sculptures. Paintings. Drawings, 1954, no. 24, n.p., illustrated (dated 1906)

Stockholm, Nationalmuseum, Modern Utländsk Konst ur svenska privatsamlingar, 1954, no. 106, p. 23

Stockholm, Nationalmuseum and Helsinki, Helsingin Taidehalli, Henri Matisse, Apollon, 1957-58, no. 24/90 (Stockholm); no. 149 (Helsinki)

Liège, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Apollon. Collection Theodor Ahrenberg, 1958, no. 149

Kunsthaus Zürich, Henri Matisse. Das Plastische Werk, 1959, no. 33, p. 14, illustrated (dated 1906)

Göteborg, Konsthallen, Henri Matisse ur Theodor Ahrenbergs Samling, 1960, no. 185

Fort Worth, Kimbell Art Museum, Henri Matisse Sculptor/Painter, 1984, no. 16, pp. 11, 15 and 72-74, p. 24, illustrated in color; p. 71, illustrated;

New York, C&M Arts, Henri Matisse: Sculpture, 1998, pl. 10, illustrated in color

Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada, 2020-25 (long term loan)

Jean Selz, Modern Sculpture: Origins and Evolution, New York, 1963, pl. VIII, illustration in color of another cast; p. 278

Herbert Read, A Concise History of Modern Sculpture, London, 1964, fig. 27, p. 35, illustration of another cast; pp. 38 and 298 

Hilton Kramer, “Matisse as a Sculptor,” Boston Museum Bulletin, vol. 64, no. 336, 1966, fig. 4, p. 54, illustration of another cast; p. 55

Hjorvadur Harvard Arnason, History of Modern Art. Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, New York, 1968, fig. 178, p. 114; p. 115, illustration of another cast 

Mario Luzi and Massimo Carrà, L’Opera di Matisse dalla rivolta ‘fauve’ all'intimismo 1904-1928, Milan, 1971, no. S4, p. 108, illustration of another cast; p. 109

Albert E. Elsen, The Sculpture of Henri Matisse, New York, 1972, pls. 109-110, p. 87, 90-91, 93, 95, 113 and 182; p. 88, illustrations of another cast; p. 111, illustration of another cast (in installation image of Paris, Galerie Pierre, Henri Matisse, 1930)

Ellen Charlotte Oppler, Fauvism Reexamined, New York and London, 1976, pl. 65, illustration of another cast; pp. 142-43, illustration of another cast

Theodore Reff, “Matisse: Meditations on a Statuette and Goldfish,” Arts, vol. 51, no. 3, November 1976, fig. 25, p. 115, illustration of another cast

Pierre Schneider, Matisse, Paris, 1984, pp. 170, 328, 548, 557, 564, 566; p. 549, illustration of another cast

Jack Flam, Matisse: The Man and His Art 1869-1918, Ithaca and London, 1986, fig. 236, pp. 270, 321, 426 and 494, note 47; p. 238, illustration of another cast

Jack Flam, ed., Matisse: A Retrospective, New York, 1988, p. 71, illustration of another cast; p. 133, illustration of another cast (in installation photograph of Paris, Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Tableaux du Maroc et sculptures, 1913)

Xavier Girard, Matisse. Une splendeur inouïe, Paris, 1993, p. 89

Walter Guadagnini, Matisse, Milan, 1993, p. 269, illustration of another cast

Albert Kostenevich and Natalia Semyonova, Collecting Matisse, Paris, 1993, p. 127 

Julie Harboe, European Art in the 20th Century: Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen, 1994, no. 48, pp. 8 and 102; p. 103, illustration of another cast

Frederick Hartt, A History of Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, New York, 1994, fig. 35-5, p. 963; p. 964, illustration in color of another cast 

Guy Patrice Dauberville and Michel Dauberville, Matisse: Henri Matisse Chez Bernheim-Jeune, vol. I, Paris, 1995, pp. 88-89, illustration of another cast (in installation photograph of Paris, Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Tableaux du Maroc et sculptures, 1913); vol. II, no. 798, p. 1417, illustration of another cast (titled Figure assise et accoudée)

Claude Duthuit and Wanda de Guébriant, Henri Matisse, Catalogue raisonné de l’oeuvre sculpté, Paris, 1997, no. 41, p. XVIII and 375; pp. 110-11 and 113, illustrations of another cast

Hilary Spurling, Matisse the Master: A Life of Henri Matisse: The Conquest of Colour 1909-1954, New York, 2005, p. 182

Rémi Labrusse and Jacqueline Munck, Matisse-Derain: La Vérité du Fauvisme, Paris, 2005, p. 168; p. 169, illustration in color of another cast

Éric Alliez and Jean-Claude Bonne, La Pensée-Matisse: portrait de l'artiste en hyperfauve, Paris, 2005, vol. I, p. 238; vol. II, pl. 44; illustration of another cast

Shirley Nielsen Blum, Henri Matisse: Rooms with a View, New York, 2010, no. 36, pp. 49-50, 54 and 186; p. 57, illustration of another cast (dated 1906-07)

One of the most important sculptures of Matisse’s oeuvre, Figure décorative stands among the limited yet critical body of three-dimensional works that directly informed the artist’s painting practice. With its arresting pose, strident gaze and elaborate play with weight and counterbalance, Figure décorative declared a new direction in the artist’s career, as he began to prioritize volumetric form.

The present work was conceived in Paris in August of 1908, a moment which found Matisse negotiating new artistic terrain. Fauvism had freed the artist from naturalistic representation, but despite these pictorial advances, Matisse had grown concerned with what he saw as a foundational lack of structure in this new mode (see fig. 1). While visiting Algeria in 1906 and Italy the following year, he encountered the bold patterns of Islamic art and the stylized figuration of proto-Renaissance artists, Giotto and Duccio, leading him to pay an increased attention to the corporeal integrity of the human figure, both in his paintings and his modelling in the round.

Whereas his previous sculptures were often modest in scope and exploratory in nature, the scale and composition of Figure décorative convey Matisse’s increasingly ambitious attitude at the end of the decade. It is the largest three-dimensional work since his first sculpture, Le Serf of 1903, and announced a decisive shift toward a new clarity and presence. At over twice the height of many of his earlier works, Matisse’s figure is assertive, her tactile mass calibrated to command the surrounding space, while proving structurally sound and visually balanced. The block on which she leans with her proper right arm, becomes an integral compositional device, a weighty counter to the body’s accentuated curves. Far from a neutral prop, it highlights the precarity of the woman’s pose as her hip and thigh barely rest upon it. At first glance, it may appear like a supporting pedestal, but the powerful musculature of her crossed legs also anchors the sculpture, as do the feet planted firmly on the ground.

The enlarged scale and assertive modeling of the present work were also prompted by Matisse’s engagement with the aesthetic questions circulating in Paris at the time, particularly those raised by Picasso’s radical experiments. As such, the sculpture stands as both an assertion of the artist’s autonomy and a quiet riposte to the emergent Cubist idiom. As Michael Mezzatesta writes, “The dramatic fracturing and geometricizing of the human form developed by Picasso and Braque in 1907 and 1908 was answered by Matisse in two sculptures [including] Decorative Figure… which maintained the integrity and unity of the body while still exploring its weight, solidity and architectonic structure. Nothing in Matisse’s painting at this point was as advanced as these sculptures, and the confidence he gained through their realization helped him to use the figure as the main feature of his compositions” (Exh. Cat., Fort Worth, Kimbell Art Museum, Henri Matisse, Sculptor/Painter, 1984, p. 11).

Yet Matisse also looked to the lessons learned from his early sculptural practice, which he later recorded in his celebrated treatise Notes of a Painter of 1908. As he instructed his students at the Académie Matisse: “The joints, like wrists, ankles, knees and elbows must show that they can support the limbs—especially when the limbs are supporting the body. And in cases of poses resting upon a special limb arm or leg, the joint is better when exaggerated than when underexpressed. Above all, one must be careful not to cut the limb at the joints as an inherent part of the limb. The neck must be heavy enough to support the head... Put in no holes that hurt the ensemble, as between thumb and fingers lying at the side. Express by masses in relation to one another, and large sweeps of line in interrelation. One must determine the characteristic form of the different parts of the body and the direction of the contours which will give this form… One can divide one’s work by opposing lines (axes) which give the direction of the parts and thus build up the body in a manner that at once suggests its general character and movement” (quoted in Alfred H. Barr, Jr, “Matisse speaks to his students,” Matisse: His Art and His Public, New York, 1951, p. 55) (see fig. 2).

Rooted in the compositional motif first explored in the 1907 painting La Coiffure, Figure décorative translates painterly impulse into sculptural mass (see fig. 3). The cross-legged figure in the painting is here transformed in bronze, her figure a consummate embodiment of poise, and the form a radical feat in compositional balance and counterweight. In the present work, Matisse’s sitter is self-contained, her legs rooted into the ground beneath her, arms angled inward. Seated on the edge of a rectangular pedestal, she assumes a pose that is both frontal and informal, with all the confidence and ease of Amélie Matisse in the artist’s Le Madras rouge (see fig. 4). As in the painting, the figure’s hips are thrust to one side while a support offsets her posture, anticipating the architectonic balance of Matisse’s later interiors. Her body extends laterally, yet the composition retains a poised symmetry, with limbs, trunk, and base engaging in a play of right angles and sinuous curves.

As Albert Elsen describes, “There is no coy evasion of the viewer by averting the model’s gaze: like Manet’s Olympia, the woman confidently displays her body for inspection… Her sensuousness comes from the serpentine pose and promising proportions. The box on which she sits recalls the studio; the prudent gesture of the left hand echoes that of a hundred paintings and statues of Venus. From antiquity to the present time, who can count the number of seated women in sculpture? But how many were shown naked, in the round with legs crossed at the knees?” (Albert E. Elsen, The Sculpture of Henri Matisse, New York, 1972, p. 87) (see fig. 5).

In Figure décorative, the curvaceous anatomy—breast, buttocks and thigh—is exaggerated, amplified and rhythmically organized, drawing inspiration from the simplified forms of African art, which Matisse began collecting in 1906 (see fig. 7), while also nodding to a classical lyricism in the contrapposto-like posture. This refined balance of structural form and sensuous surface reflects Matisse’s increasing preoccupation with questions of permanence, monumentality and formal order following the advent of Fauvism.

Figure décorative is a direct manifestation of the artist’s search for a mode of artistry grounded in the physical and tactile—one that situates the female nude not simply as subject but as both a response and a solution to the proto-Cubist idiom set forth in paintings like Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon (see fig. 6) and Braque’s Le Grand nu—both also deeply indebted to African statuary. Matisse’s work from 1908, including Figure décorative and his monumental canvas Les Baigneuses à la tortue (see fig. 8), captures a volumetric sensitivity largely absent in the geometricized forms of his peers. As Mezzatesta contends, “Through the winter and spring of 1908, Picasso’s nudes evolved toward an increasingly abstract, solid geometry which defines the figure by an interlocking system of angles and planes. The faceted, triangular forms…were undoubtedly foreign to Matisse’s ideas concerning the integrity, unity, and expressive purpose of the human body” (Exh. Cat., Henri Matisse, Sculptor/Painter, ibid., p. 72).

The profundity of the sculptural feat was evident from its origination; Figure décorative would reappear throughout the artist’s painted corpus, most notably in the masterful L’Atelier rose and L’Atelier rouge of 1911 (see figs. 9 and 10) and later in his 1916 La Leçon de piano (see fig. 11). The inclusion of such sculptural works would prove a recurring theme throughout the artist’s oeuvre, not only as a celebration of his modeling prowess in three dimensions, but also as an added pictorial element, often suggesting a human presence within scenes otherwise bereft of figures.

As Ann Temkin describes Figure décorative, “Matisse’s most prolific period of making sculpture were those few years before L’Atelier rouge. The idea of sculpture for him was one of expressing the vitality of the female figure, not by realistic resemblance—he wanted to create a work of art that had its own expressive reality, its own formal force” (Ann Temkin, “Henri Matisse. Decorative Figure. 1908,” Matisse: The Red Studio, 2002, https://www.moma.org/audio/playlist/322/4211, accessed on 10 August 2025).

With its serene gaze, exaggerated yet balanced anatomy, and quietly commanding presence, Figure décorative represents a synthesis of modernist innovation and classical idealism. It is among the earliest and most fully realized examples of Matisse’s vision of the nude as both icon and archetype—a vision that would shape the course of his art for decades to follow.

In this edition of ten plus one artist's proof, only four others are held in private hands, with the remaining belonging to the museum collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., the Saint Louis Art Museum and the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen. Cast during the artist’s lifetime in 1950, the present work has been widely exhibited throughout its history and was first owned by Swedish businessman and collector Theodor Ahrenberg and his wife, Ulla. Regarded among the most influential and important collectors of the twentieth century, the Ahrenbergs came to know Matisse personally, acquiring a nearly complete set of the artist’s bronzes. In 1960, their entire collection of Matisse sculpture was sold in the notable sale Forty-Nine Bronzes by Matisse at Sotheby’s in London. Celebrated as both a milestone in the evolution of modern sculpture and a work of enduring appeal, Matisse’s Figure décorative remains among the most frequently cited sculptures in the scholarly discourse on the artist.