Femme au chapeau (Woman with a Hat)

Paris

Henri Matisse

Femme au chapeau (Woman with a Hat)

1905

Oil on canvas, 80.7 × 59.7 cm. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco

A half-length portrait of his wife, Amélie, holding a fan under a huge, heaped-up hat. Its first public showing set off a scandal.

  • Hung in Gallery VII at the 1905 Salon d'Automne, the show that gave the group its name.
  • Look at the background: loose, unblended patches of pink, green and violet suggest no real room.
  • Thick strokes sit beside thin, scrubbed washes, and no edge is smoothly drawn.
  • The face is green, pink and ochre, with no tie to real skin tones. Color here carries structure and feeling, not likeness.
  • Leo and Gertrude Stein bought it in 1905; the museum was showing it on loan by 1936, and it joined the collection in 1991 as the bequest of Elise S. Haas.
Salon d'Automne
A yearly autumn exhibition in Paris that showed newer, less official art.
Fauvism
From fauves, French for "wild beasts": a movement in Paris that used bright, unnatural color for expressive force.

Image: Wikimedia Commons · PD-US-expired / PD-old-70

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