"Femme au chapeau" by Henri Matisse

"Femme au chapeau" by Henri Matisse.

Lithograph on vellum paper, signed and dated lower left.

Lithograph printed by Fernand MOURLOT in 1939, original limited edition from 1939, no longer available.

"Femme au chapeau" by Henri Matisse

• Title: Femme au chapeau
• Technique: Lithograph
• Signed and dated in the lower left panel
• Period 1930-1939
• Edition: First edition 1939 - Mourlot
• Condition: Good
• Image size 35×26 cm
• Total size 35×26×0 cm
• Never framed

Henri Émile Benoît Matisse was a French artist, known for both his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but is known primarily as a painter. Matisse is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Picasso, as one of the artists who best helped to define the revolutionary developments in the visual artsthroughout the opening decades of the twentieth century, responsible for significant developments in painting and sculpture.

The intense colorism of the works he painted between 1900 and 1905 brought him notoriety as one of the Fauves (wild beasts). Many of his finest works were created in the decade or so after 1906, when he developed a rigorous style that emphasized flattened forms and decorative pattern. In 1917, he relocated to a suburb of Nice on the French Riviera, and the more relaxed style of his work during the 1920s gained him critical acclaim as an upholder of the classical tradition in French painting. After 1930, he adopted a bolder simplification of form.

His mastery of the expressive language of colour and drawing, displayed in a body of work spanning over a half-century, won him recognition as a leading figure in modern art.