HENRI MATISSE Jeune femme à la chevelure encadrant le visage.
Soft-ground etching, 1948. 345x288mm; 13 5/8x11 3/8 inches, full margins. Signed, numbered 5/5 and dedicated, "à Nadia Sednaoui, affectueusement" in pencil, lower margin. A superb impression of this extremely scarce etching.
When Nadia Sednaoui (1925-2015) first encountered Matisse's (1869-1954) work in an art publication as a teenager living in Cairo during World War II, she vowed one day to see his paintings in Paris. After the war, she and her parents moved to Paris, and Sednaoui finally met the long admired artist through his son-in-law and art critic, Georges Duthuit. Despite their age difference, they became friends almost immediately. Though she never called herself one of the artist's models, Matisse would draw and paint Sednaoui during her afternoon visits in the early 1950s in the years prior to his death. Duthuit 312.
