Henri Matisse

In 1935 Lydia Delectorskaya became Matisse’s most important model and his muse. Ever in search of absolute harmony in a consummate décoration, the painter was powerfully struck by her long-limbed body and the shape of her face. Lydia was not only the inspiration behind a number of his major paintings but also influenced his style of draughtsmanship. In the drawings that he made of her, Matisse further developed his astounding ability to infuse every line with expression and to convey the three-dimensional body in just a few strokes. A particular feature of this work is the way in which Matisse has combined the use of charcoal with a smudging technique to invest his drawing with painterly expression.

Interior with black fern is one of the last pictures that Matisse painted prior to turning his attention almost exclusively to papiers découpés. Here he has arrived at a harmony of figure, objects, interior and exterior space. Various zones of colour are juxtaposed: the red wallpaper with its regular geometric pattern, the yellow carpet dotted with black, the green disc of the table bearing a vase that is also patterned with dots, and the black providing the ground for the artist’s signature. The woman on the left has no individuality; the white of her dress and the pink of her skin play a crucial role in the picture’s composition. The link between the exterior glimpsed above right, where we can make out a tree, and the interior is provided by the fern, which is seen against the light and consequently appears black. This work underlines a distinctive characteristic of Matisse’s painting: his pictures possess a rhythm that arises not just out of the movement of his painting hand but also from the relationship between the parts of the picture, which seems to obey laws similar to a musical structure.