Henri Matisse
Trained for the law, discovered painting in a sickbed, and ended cutting colour with scissors.
Henri Matisse was born at Le Cateau-Cambresis in 1869 and was working as a legal clerk when his mother gave him a paintbox during a long convalescence. He was thirty before he committed to it. Fauvism made him notorious in 1905; Dance and Music for the Moscow collector Shchukin made him important; and the decades that followed produced the Nice odalisques, the Barnes mural, the Vence chapel he designed entire, and finally, when illness confined him to bed and a wheelchair, the cut-outs — sheets painted in gouache and cut directly with scissors, which he called drawing with colour. He died in 1954.
Matisse is one of the most systematically forged artists of the century, particularly in drawing, and the Wildenstein Plattner Institute and the artist's heirs hold the archives and the catalogue work that attribution depends on. The printed output — etchings, lithographs, linocuts, aquatints, and the pochoir Jazz — is very large and is catalogued by Duthuit; edition, state, paper and whether an impression is a lifetime one are what set the value. Jazz plates removed from the book, and later reproductions of the cut-outs, are frequently offered as original prints.
If you own a work by Henri Matisse
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.