?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 15,000 - $ 20,000
HENRI MATISSE Henri Matisse gravant.
Drypoint printed in black on cream wove paper, 1900-03. 150x200 mm; 6x7 7/8 inches, full margins. Fourth state (of 4). An artist's proof in this state, before the completion of the subject, lower left. A superb impression of this extremely scarce, early self portrait, showing the artist working on a copper etching plate.
Born in the north of France to a family of weavers and grain merchants, Matisse grew up in a rustic, pre-industrial town before eventually going away for school and to Paris to study Law. In 1889, after passing the bar exam and becoming a law clerk (which he found exceedingly tedious), he was struck with appendicitis and it was only then, when his mother brought him art supplies during his convalescence, that he began to paint.
Matisse himself was not looking to be a revolutionary artist and found the constant criticism of his work in his early career to be disheartening. He met strong criticism when his work debuted in Paris at the Salon d'Automne in 1905. It was in this exhibition that Matisse and fellow artists gained the moniker Fauves (which means "wild beasts") because of their perceived violent disregard for realistic use of color and form. While he exhibited with other Fauves like Derain (see lot 401), Vlaminck, and Kees van Dongen (see lot 408), it was Matisse who met with the most criticism for his painting Woman with a Hat, 1905. In this early work by Matisse, the influence of bright Pointillist colors and Paul Cezanne's painterly impasto came together, and Matisse created one of the pillars of modern painting.
This drypoint is Matisse's first intaglio print and his earliest printed self portrait. It is an introspective, quiet and subdued portrait, created around the same time as some of his brashest, most colorful Fauve paintings. Duthuit 1.
