Image source: Wikimedia Commons (Public domain). View source
Woman with a Hat
Henri Matisse · Early Modern (Fauvism, Cubism, Expressionism)
- Artist
- Henri Matisse (1869–1954)
- Date
- 1905
- Dimensions
- 80.7 x 59.7 cm
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Location
- San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, United States
Woman with a Hat is a portrait of the painter's wife, Amélie Matisse, wearing an elaborate hat and holding a fan. Her face is painted in streaks of green, pink, yellow and blue, and the background is a patchwork of bright, loosely brushed colour.
A closer look
Matisse used colour not to describe what he saw but to express feeling and to build the picture: a green line runs down the nose, the shadows are violet and the hat explodes in red, blue and green. The brushwork is rapid and visible everywhere, and parts of the canvas are left almost bare. When the painting was shown at the Salon d'Automne in Paris in 1905, it caused an uproar, and a critic called Matisse and his friends 'fauves', wild beasts, giving Fauvism its name.
History of the painting
After Leo and Gertrude Stein, the painting passed to Matisse’s close friends and patrons Michael and Sarah Stein, Gertrude’s brother and sister-in-law, who later moved to California. It remained in Bay Area collections, and in 1991 it came to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art with the bequest of Elise S. Haas.
