Henri Matisse

Estate of the artist

Lumley Cazalet, Ltd., London

Christie’s, New York, 11 May 1989, lot 338

John and Paul Herring, New York (acquired at the above sale)

Acquired from the above on 3 March 1994 by the present owner

Greenwich, Bruce Museum, Paris Portraits: Artists, Friends, and Lovers, 2008-09, no. 27a, fig. 47, pp. 50 and 52; pp. 51 and 112, illustrated in color

Albert E. Elsen, The Sculpture of Henri Matisse, New York, 1972, pl. 219, p. 161; p. 163, illustration of another cast (titled Henriette I (Grosse tête))

William Tucker, Early Modern Sculpture, New York, 1974, fig. 92, p. 97, illustration of another cast; p. 168 

Isabelle Monod-Fontaine, ed., Matisse: oeuvres de Henri Matisse, 1869-1954, Paris, 1979, fig. a, p. 158, illustration of another cast

Pierre Schneider, Matisse, New York, 1984, pp. 536 and 561-62; p. 560, illustration of another cast

Isabelle Monod-Fontaine, Anne Baldassari and Claude Laugier, Matisse, Paris, 1989, fig. a, p. 334, illustration of another cast

Ernst-Gerhard Güse, ed., Henri Matisse, Drawings and Sculpture, Munich, 1991, pl. 131, illustration of another cast; p. 193 (titled Henriette I (Bulky Head))

Sarah Wilson, Matisse, New York, 1992, p. 14

Walter Guadagnini, Matisse, Milan, 1993, p. 263; p. 279, illustration of another cast

Claude Duthuit and Wanda de Guébriant, Henri Matisse, Catalogue raisonné de l’oeuvre sculpté, Paris, 1997, no. 66, pp. XIV, 190, 192 and 371; pp. 191 and 193, illustrations of another cast

Pierre Daix, Pour une histoire culturelle de l'art moderne: Le XXe siècle, Paris, 2000, p. 228 (titled Grosse tête (Henriette I) and dated 1927)

Elizabeth Cowling, Picasso: Style and Meaning, London and New York, 2002, p. 670, note 167

John Elderfield, ed., Visions of Modern Art: Painting and Sculpture from The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2003, pp. 63 and 326 

Hilary Spurling, Matisse the Master: A Life of Henri Matisse: The Conquest of Colour 1909-1954, New York, 2005, p. 274 (titled Henriette)

Henri Matisse had spent the period since his 1918 arrival in Nice reacting to his new surroundings and capturing every nuance of the model Henriette Darricarrère, one of the most important sitters of his career and the model for his storied 1920s odalisque paintings. After seven years of sustained engagement with Darricarrère, in 1925 he sought to transform her likeness across a suite of sculptural heads—his first sculptures in a decade. “It is almost as though, having drawn and painted innumerable images of her body,” Isabelle Monod-Fontaine posits, “... he wanted to attempt a true portrait that has an intensity which, to my knowledge, he never achieved in painting” (Isabelle Monod-Fontaine, The Sculpture of Henri Matisse, London, 1984, p. 38). Together, Henriette I, II and III underscore Matisse’s evolving investigation of the female portrait and his deep exploration of the relationship between realism and abstraction.

Matisse took his first room at the Hotel Méditerranée in November 1918, returning to Nice every autumn for the subsequent three years amidst his frequent travels throughout Europe. The artist at last settled in an apartment on the third floor of 1, Place Charles-Félix in 1921. Ensconced atop a hill with a south-facing view of the Baie des Anges with a studio continually awash in the warm glow of Mediterranean sun, Matisse would here enter the apex of his Nice period, among the most productive and storied of his career. “He was now a formal resident of Nice, the jewel of the Mediterranean,” Jack Cowart noted, “The taking of the place Charles-Félix apartment was a major step in personal, physical, and creative attachment that would bind the artist to Nice and the Côte d’Azur until his death thirty-three years later” (Exh. Cat., Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, Henri Matisse: The Early Years in Nice, 1916-1930, 1986, pp. 30-32).

Henriette Darricarrère was Matisse’s primary model from 1920 to 1927, to that point his longest sustained engagement with a single model. The artist first encountered the young woman at the Studios de la Victorine on the outskirts of Nice, where she was working as a film extra, and hewas enchanted by her elegance: “Henriette’s poise and fluidity, her regular features and oval face, her air of being at ease in her body, added up to a kind of physical perfection,” Hilary Spurling describes, “Henriette was a living sculpture” (Hilary Spurling, Matisse the Master, A Life of Henri Matisse: The Conquest of Colour, 1909-1954, New York, 2005, p. 270). A ballerina, violinist and artist, Darricarrère’s theatrical mien perfectly suited the languorous, costumed personae Matisse sought to portray in his odalisques. Jack Cowart underscores, “During her seven years of modeling, Henriette excelled at role-playing and had a theatrical presence that fueled the evolution of Matisse’s art… She adopted the subject roles more easily and could express the moods and atmosphere of Matisse’s settings without losing her own presence or her own strong appearance. Her distinctive physical features—a sculpturesque body and a finely detailed face with a beautiful profile—are evident in many of the artist’s paintings, sculptures, and works on paper” (Exh. Cat., The Early Years in Nice, ibid., p. 27) (see figs. 1, 2 and 6).

Sculpture served as a counterpoint for Matisse’s paintings and drawings throughout his career, revealing a parallel exploration of volume, rhythm, and structure and proved essential to the artist’s development. “From his earliest days as a student,” writes Hilary Spurling, “Matisse needed sculpture—the physical release of pummeling clay—at intervals as a counterpoint to painting. In Nice, drawings and clay figures based on Michelangelo enriched and invigorated his work on canvas for more than a decade. ‘I shall go back to painting transformed, I’m sure of that,’ he wrote…‘I’m beginning little by little to get rid of the feeling that, if what I’m doing is only sculpture, it isn’t really serious’” (Hilary Spurling, Matisse the Master, A Life of Henri Matisse: The Conquest of Colour, 1909-1954, p. 282). While the majority of Matisse’s sculptural output was executed between the years of 1907-10, the artist once again took up a productive sculpture practice during his Nice period. Beginning in 1922 and concurrently with his Henriette works, Matisse executed his major sculptural odalisque, Grand nu assis (see fig. 3), for which Henriette also posed; it was finally cast in bronze in 1929, the year the artist completed Henriette III.

Matisse created the trio of bronze busts Henriette I, Henriette II and Henriette III between 1925 and 1929, essentially at two-year intervals. This serial mode of working found direct precedent in the iterative renderings of models Jeannette and Madeleine and his famed monumental bas-relief series of Le Dos, all of which revealed a progressive abstraction of the female form (see figs. 4 and 5). Basing each successive version of his Henriettes on the plaster of the prior version, the series charts a significant stylistic shift through distinctive modifications to the stylization of the hair and face. Each variation marks a process of distillation as Matisse gradually reduced naturalistic detail in favor of essentialized forms. The Henriette series thus operates not only as a portrait of a model but as a portrait of the artist’s creative evolution—a record of Matisse’s ongoing engagement with form, space and abstraction.

Henriette I presents a relatively naturalistic portrait. The modeling is sensitive, with softly rendered facial features and a clear sense of volume around the cheeks and neck, retaining the self-possessed physicality most in line with his paintings of her. His close observation of her likeness is evidenced by the subtle elongation of her proper left eye and the slight downturn of that on the right. Henriette I emphasizes Matisse’s extraordinary handling of material, which plays a crucial role throughout this series. “One of the most arresting elements of this sculpture,” Heather MacDonald writes, “is the lump on the forehead, just above her right brow. According to the reminiscences of Matisse’s family, his was what he called a pastille, or lozenge. The lump of clay, something like a flaw, applied to the clay model at the end of each session served Matisse at the outset of a new modeling session to reengage with the sculpture… [reflecting] Matisse’s love of the traces of process and mold making, which he often elected to leave visible in the clay and cast into the bronze.” (Exh. Cat., Baltimore Museum of Art, Henri Matisse: Painter as Sculptor, p. 208).

Henriette II, in a radical formal reduction, eliminates the distinguishing elements of his sitter’s individuality, supplanting specificity of surface detail with an emphasis on her overall facial architecture. Eyes, hair and mouth are refined to a succession of swelling curves and smoothed masses, imbuing a youthful fullness and symmetry. As such, the present work achieves a monumental presence, recalling not only the stylized austerity of Jacques Lipchitz’s portrait busts but also the harmonizing, refined amplitudes of Aristide Maillol’s female nudes.

Henriette III, the final in the series, marks the most radical departure. Darricarrère, due to health issues, had by this time ceased modeling for Matisse: the present work underscores Matisse’s progression away from representation toward a sculptural language based on rhythm, proportion, and internal harmony. “Matisse took the natural lines of the face as a starting point for reshaping the head,” Michael Mezzatesta expounds, “He emphasized those lines around the mouth, nose and eyes—excavating, planing and faceting the chin with bold slicing cuts. Eyebrows were raised and joined to the bridge of the nose in outward-arcing ridges, and the eyes filled in and incised with the point of the knife. The surface has also been roughened, textured and made more expressive…he sought to invigorate the work sculpturally, a process indifferent to the sitter’s personality” (Exh. Cat., Fort Worth, Kimbell Art Museum, Henri Matisse: Sculptor/Painter, 1984, p. 122).

The transformation evident in Henriette III is not a rejection of the model but rather a reinterpretation—a way of seeing Henriette beyond the contours of her face. Matisse himself declared, “I do not strive to detail all the facial features, to render them one after another with anatomical precision…Working on a model, I discover for myself the most important aspects of her being. I attempt to understand, to capture those lines of the face which bespeak a character and which are present in every human being” (Henri Matisse, Notes of a Painter, 1908, quoted in Exh. Cat., New York, The Museum of Modern Art, The Drawings of Henri Matisse, 1985, p. 70). Henriette III makes clear the influence of Auguste Rodin’s revolutionary approach to sculptural form—his emphasis on expressive distortion, his willingness to fragment the human body for emotional effect, and his understanding of sculpture as a vehicle for psychological exploration. Like Rodin, Matisse understood that sculptural truth lay not in mere physical accuracy but in the ability to translate human experience into three-dimensional form.

The Henriette sculptures not only reflect Matisse’s personal trajectory but also engage in a dialogue with contemporaries such as Pablo Picasso and Alberto Giacometti—artists similarly invested in the possibilities of serial sculptural portraiture (see fig. 8). Picasso’s sculptural practice frequently returned to the female head as a site of formal experimentation, with works such as Tête de Fernande (1909) (see fig. 7) and Tête de femme (1931-32) showing his movement from Cubist fragmentation to a more organic, almost archaic stylization. Like Matisse, Picasso often employed repetition and variation, not to produce replicas, but to test the boundaries of form. Giacometti’s busts of his wife Annette and model Caroline served as means through which the artist explored presence, perception, and spatial compression. While both these busts and Matisse’s Henriettes evoke a shifting tension between abstraction and representation, the latter emphasize harmonious rhythm over existential tension, remaining serenely balanced and internally coherent where Giacometti’s move towards dissolution in space.

Matisse’s handling of Henriette’s likeness demonstrates that modernism could evolve not only through radical breaks but also through sustained, incremental refinement, moving from naturalistic likeness to distilled abstraction. Pierre Schneider declares: “His series do not consist of successive stages, but of independent states, each of which is equally final yet temporary. The effect—and probably intention—of these multiple representations is that no single one is identified exclusively within the artist’s vision” (Pierre Schneider, Matisse, New York, 1993, p. 562).

This marks the first known instance that the complete series of Henriette heads has been offered at auction, with other complete sets belonging to the Musée Matisse, Nice and the Centre Pompidou, Paris, on long-term loan to the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dijon. Individual examples from the series are also held at prestigious museum collections including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.