Henri Matisse

The transformation of his palette came through a series of encounters in the late 1890s. A visit to the island of Belle-Île in 1896 brought him into contact with the Australian painter John Russell, who introduced him to Impressionism and showed him van Gogh's work. A period studying in the south of France and then in Corsica brought an awareness of Mediterranean light that stayed with him for the rest of his career. By 1905, exhibiting at the Salon d'Automne alongside André Derain and others, he was at the centre of the group that the critic Louis Vauxcelles famously called the Fauves, the wild beasts, for their use of pure, unmodulated colour pulled directly from the tube. The painting that attracted most attention was "Woman with a Hat," a portrait of his wife Amélie rendered in arbitrary, almost violent colours, which Leo and Gertrude Stein acquired from that same exhibition.

Matisse settled in Nice in 1917, initially to treat bronchitis, and remained on the Côte d'Azur for most of the rest of his life. The light and the reflections off the sea became central to his working process. The Odalisque paintings of the 1920s, figures in interiors filled with patterns, textiles, and ornamental objects, came out of this period. In parallel, he was developing a serious practice as a printmaker. He had made his first etchings and lithographs as early as 1906, but from 1918 onwards printmaking became a sustained activity. In his career he produced 825 prints in total: 305 lithographs, 316 etchings and drypoints, 62 aquatints, 70 linocuts, 68 monotypes, and 4 woodcuts. The defining quality of his prints, as with his drawings, was the economy and sensuality of line, a single fluid mark capturing the weight and warmth of a figure or the structure of a plant.

Illustrated books occupied him through the 1930s and 1940s. His etchings for Stéphane Mallarmé's "Poésies" (1932) and his linocut illustrations for the "Florilège des Amours" of Ronsard (begun 1941) show the sustained seriousness with which he approached the livre d'artiste as a form. The book "Jazz" (1947), produced in collaboration with the publisher Tériade, placed hand-written text alongside images made from cut and pasted coloured paper, and marked the emergence of the paper cut-out as a fully independent medium. After abdominal surgery in 1941 left him unable to stand for long periods, cutting and pinning coloured paper became his primary way of working. The Chapelle du Rosaire at Vence, which he designed entirely, stained glass, ceramic tiles, vestments, between 1948 and 1951, is the most complete expression of this late synthesis.

Matisse died of a heart attack in Nice on 3 November 1954 and is buried in the cemetery of the Monastère Notre Dame de Cimiez. His prints circulate widely at auction, and the Nordic market is no exception. At Scandinavian houses, his works appear most often under the headings of prints and engravings and, less frequently, as drawings and oil studies. Top results include a "Seated Nude, seen from behind" at 75,000 NOK, "Little, blue interior" at 66,000 NOK, and "Sittende kvinneakt" at 62,000 NOK, sold through houses including Grev Wedels Plass in Oslo and Crafoord in Lund. The volume of material, 73 items recorded to date, and the consistency of interest across Oslo, Stockholm, Gothenburg, and Halmstad suggests a stable collector base for his prints across the Nordic countries.