The Unknown Matisse by Hilary Spurling

Author:Hilary Spurling
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141934907
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2009-06-07T16:00:00+00:00

Matisse and his father confronted one another with mutual bitterness and frustration, each conscious of the other’s distress but unable to ease it by shifting his own position. It was the kind of standoff Matisse would re-create with his own sons long afterwards, when he looked back ruefully to the past (“I don’t know if you’ll be able to understand what I’m saying yet,” he wrote to Pierre in 1938; “perhaps you’ll need a few more years—for where your father can’t make you understand, your children will often succeed”).96 In 1903 the upshot was flight. Matisse could not go on forever occupying premises normally let out to paying tenants in a town where his very presence brought shame on his relations. In July he found a house eight miles away on a bluff above the river Oise in the village of Lesquielles St-Germain, where he planned to settle with his wife and children. To the gossips of Bohain this move looked like outright victory for Hippolyte Henri Matisse. They still talked more than ten years later of “the poor holiday tenant of the Oise Valley, when his terrible father as good as threw him out.”97

The rent of the new house was twenty-eight francs a month98 (just over five dollars, half or two thirds the amount the studio on the quai St-Michel would have brought in if Matisse had found another tenant). Lesquielles was an ancient weavers’ village, hugely swollen in response to industrial demand by a sprawl of one-storey brick hovels housing two thousand factory workers, who commuted night and morning by cheap trains to the neighbouring town of Guise. Matisse proposed to live and paint here for a year with his wife and children on an income even more uncertain than a casual labourer’s wage. It was a dire solution to a desperate predicament. “I have by now exhausted my family, who are frankly and purely bourgeois, and I can’t count on them any longer,” Matisse explained on 31 July in a letter from Lesquielles to Bussy.99

His hope was that Amélie (whose health began to mend as soon as they left Bohain) would regain her strength over the next year, during which the family would scrape by on whatever could be raised by selling pictures. According to Jean Puy, Matisse had made 1,200 francs at the end of 1902 from the sale of five or six studies (including the chrysanthemums in the coffeepot) to Vollard, who approved of his new, subdued and sober style.100 More sales might follow, but Vollard’s cat-and-mouse tactics as a dealer meant that no one, least of all anyone as hard-pressed as Matisse, could pin much faith on his hints and half promises. Berthe Weill was rich in loyalty and enthusiasm but as short of ready money as her artists. A base in the country ruled out the usual standby of Louvre copies. Matisse had written in May to the ever generous Puy (already installed for the summer on Belle-Ile), describing his dream of persuading

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