‘Revelation thus came to me from the Orient’, he wrote of these various experiences in 1910 and 1911, which he followed with two more trips to Morocco in 1912 and 1913. At the Great Souk in Tangier he restocked his collection from the enormous variety of silks, velvets and appliquéd cotton, stopping to listen to the flute-players, sorcerers and snake charmers. He heard ensembles of ‘ūd sharqī (lutes), rebab (two-string fiddles), kamanja (spiked fiddles played vertically on the knee) and tār (tambourines), some of which he painted into The Moroccan Café (1912–3; see Figure 130, page 224). With music on his mind Matisse wrote home to the children, urging them to practise their instruments for his return. Shortly afterwards he seemed to take his own advice, seizing a fiddle from a café entertainer and confounding the half-dozen customers with an impromptu performance (Figure 16). ‘I played well’, he told Amélie. ‘My sensibility had been stirred up by the work session I had just finished, and I gave them some nice sounds.’
The music and textiles of Morocco, Moscow and Moorish Spain had aroused all of Matisse’s senses. Combined, contemplated and conjured up in his own canvases, they added another layer of meaning to his art. Returning home from his travels, Matisse introduced goldfish to the usual array of studio paraphernalia. They swam into his picture spaces that summer as symbols of contemplation, a status they enjoyed in Morocco, just as they did in the compositions of Debussy during these years. With this, Matisse had realised a new way of seeing, presenting not an image of reality but an alternative reality that was meditative, mysterious and metaphysical. Puy at once recognised the musicality within their fabric, likening them to ‘the grave, sonorous and compelling notes of organ music.’ Matisse’s experimentation with the extreme arabesque, as an expression of himself in both its musical and textile elements, reached something of a climax after Morocco. But on the brink of world war, he braced himself for another drastic change of course.
Music and material want in wartime, 1914–9
On 1 January 1914, the day after he turned forty-four, Matisse moved back to the lively heart of Paris, taking with him the bare bones he required for a comfortable existence: paintings, violin, textiles, piano and a double bed. Before long he had resumed the habits of a lifetime, attending the opening night of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Golden Cockerel in May, flattered to find the influence of his own Harmony in Red in Goncharova’s opulent décor, the younger artist having seen the painting at Shchukin’s house in Moscow. He went to the concerts of up-and-coming musicians such as Alfred Cortot, as well as the frequent concert parties of the couturière Germaine Bongard. It was at one such gathering that he met Erik Satie, who was quite taken with the older artist (‘He admires me, and he told me so. How polite he is!’). Clearly Matisse, like most Europeans, had no premonition of impending disaster when he purchased an expensive Italian-made violin that month, an indulgence that was no doubt justified by its absolute necessity for his work.
Indeed, after the declaration of war between France and Germany on 3 August, he found himself in such a state of heightened tension that he could do nothing but play his violin: ‘Music provided the outlet Matisse could no longer find in painting’, confirms Spurling, ‘as the weeks that were to have decided the fate of France stretched out into months with no end in sight.’ Theatres closed, soldiers filled the Tuileries and public transportation ground to a halt. Boarded up back in the suburbs that winter, Matisse drove his family to despair with his relentless practising for up to five hours a day, obliging his children to do the same. ‘Father took up the violin as a discipline’, lamented Pierre. ‘That was not a pleasant way to play.’ Matters failed to improve even in Collioure. ‘Where did you put the violins?!’ he shrieked, when one of the trunks went missing. They appeared, of course, and he calmed his nerves with work on a whole series of etchings depicting young string players: the cellist Carlos Olivares and the violinists Joan Massià and Eva Mudocci.
This concentrated application in music prompted a period of intense self-scrutiny, considering the life he might have led as a violinist or even as a textile designer (the opportunity had presented itself in 1903), rather than a painter of both. He told Walter Pach on 20 November, ‘I’m leaving tomorrow for Marseille, where I’m going to spend a fortnight so as to recover completely from my bronchitis. I am taking only my violin. I shall resume painting on my return.’
Instead, he returned from his convalescence on a mission to develop the vicarious musical potential of his children. Marguerite was exempted, having learned piano in her youth and laid alternative plans to become a painter, but Jean and Pierre faced the full force of their father’s formidable conviction that they should aspire to professional standards. Jean (on cello) resorted to sabotage, losing his place in the music and finding it again in an altogether different score whenever Matisse convened the family quartet for a rehearsal. This apparent incompetence convinced Matisse that Pierre was his last chance to compensate for the musical destiny he had himself spurned. After making a chance remark about a boy he knew at school who played, at fourteen Pierre was presented with a Pressenda violin. Matisse arranged tuition for both himself and Pierre with the notable Belgian violinist Armand Parent, who was principal of the Orchestre Colonne. His appointment as the Matisse family teacher is therefore telling of the absolute priority that music was given at this time. But despite his reputation, Parent proved to be as uninspiring as his predecessor Père Pechy. As Matisse had been, Pierre was committed and anxious for his father’s approval. Together, they tackled the entire duet repertoire of Mozart, Corelli and Vivaldi, culminating in a performance of Bach’s Double Violin Concerto that went down in Matisse family lore.
Haunted by the lost practice of his own youth, Matisse withdrew Pierre from school so that he could devote himself to the cause. ‘He thought that by working very hard he could catch up with the others’, Pierre said, ‘and so I could do the same.’ Matisse devised a punishing schedule of practice for his son that began at 6 a.m. with two hours of piano scales alone in the salon. If the instrument should ever fall silent the dozing teenager would awake with a start to a thunderous hammering on the ceiling, his father ‘supervising’ proceedings from the comfort of his bed upstairs. Forbidden from sports for fear of injury, Pierre was kitted out in his brother’s hand-me-downs, with trousers altered to fit but sleeves left long to protect his hands. ‘Lucky you’, he would tell his sister, who spent her days in the privacy of the studio. ‘At least Papa can’t tell you when to stop.’ Like father, like son, Pierre was not impervious to Matisse’s obvious disappointment. He was innately musical – with a natural touch and a fluent left hand (Figure 17) – but he fundamentally lacked self-belief, which only diminished the more he tried.
The stalemate between father and son found visual form in The Piano Lesson (1916). ‘Yes, it was me’, Pierre would say of the child depicted at the Pleyel miniature grand piano, ‘and you have no idea how much I detested those piano lessons’. Fortunately for Pierre, the Parisian schedule of concerts and cabarets was soon to recover from its brief shutdown to divert his father’s attention. One contemporary British commentator applauded the wartime resurgence of the music scene, which included the concerts réguliers and the production of fifteen operas. At this time Matisse began a series of artistic collaborations known as ‘Lyre and Palette’. In the studio apartment of his former pupil Marie Vassilieff and her partner, the Swiss painter Émile Lejeune, artists of the avant-garde such as Matisse, Picasso, Léger and Modigliani displayed their work to the live musical accompaniment of composers such as Satie, Honegger, Auric and Durey (Figure 18). These gatherings proved to be an ongoing success during the years of 1916 and 1917, with limousines lined up along the rue Huyghens for the premiere and poems written for the accompanying programmes by Blaise Cendrars and Jean Cocteau. Matisse illustrated the cover of one such programme with a line-drawn portrait of H. M. Melchers, who performed his own music that evening alongside other pianist-composers such as Walter Morse Rummel and Germaine Tailleferre.
‘Flesh and Fabric’: the theatricality of the ‘Nice’ period, 1919–29
Matisse moved to Nice in the mid-December of 1917 to be near to Jean, whose draft had come through in the early summer. Before he left he dashed off a quick family portrait, reworking the
format of The Piano Lesson to include Amélie sewing in the garden, the children assembled around the piano and Matisse himself represented by his violin. Rather than confront the impending separation of the people he loved most, this painting (The Music Lesson) instead affirms Matisse’s core values, placing music, art and textiles at the heart of the family. In Nice he established for himself a daily routine of working all day and practising all night, unless Marquet took him out to the music hall. This narrow existence is reflected in a profusion of images from this period featuring violins and violinists. When the armistice was finally signed, Matisse leapt atop a café table and played a merry jig: ‘Well, mon vieux’, said Marquet. ‘If Amélie could see you now …!’
His work during the war years had taken on a armistice was finally signed, Matisse leapt atop a café table and played a merry jig. As though celebrating the return of peacetime he, too, returned to the light-hearted, Impressionistic style that had characterised his art of the mid-1890s. From this moment his textile library expanded wholesale: blouses, boleros, jackets, caps, cushions, curtains, robes, scarves, shawls, mantillas, combs, waistcoats, turbans and trousers, to which he added the haute couture of Muelle and Bongard. To house his new collection Matisse rented a two-room apartment in the autumn of 1921 which, unlike the modest seafront hotels he had occupied during his previous four seasons in Nice, provided an environment that he could adapt at will, like the film sets he observed on the western outskirts of town. His muse at the time, Antoinette Arnoud, modelled various hats that Matisse made himself as well as a white frock with a lace collar, the detail of which he returned to time and again (‘each mesh, yes, almost each thread’) until he could conjure its very essence by way of ‘an ornament, an arabesque, without losing the character of lace, and of that particular lace.’ This exercise gave him the pictorial impetus he required for the next decade, in which figure and textile would come together in a series of peculiarly erotic liaisons. ‘Flesh and Fabric’ is how Aragon perfectly encapsulated this phase of Matisse’s work.
Arnoud’s successor was Henriette Darricarrère, who worked as Matisse’s principal model for the remainder of the 1920s. She had been cherry-picked by Matisse for her grace and poise from the newly opened Studios de la Victorine, where she had worked on set as a film extra. The fact that she was a trained musician and dancer was a miraculous bonus that would benefit both in the years to come. For a start, he set her up with his own violin teacher, François Eréna, who was extremely well-connected in the Nice music scene and who selected her as the soloist for a violin concerto at one of his Sunday concerts populaires. ‘Even though she suffered wretchedly from stage-fright, she showed her fine qualities’, reported Matisse. Despite effusive praise from attending musicians of the opera and casino, she parted company with Eréna immediately after the concert, replacing him with the much less demanding Madame Spinelli. Shier than her outward beauty suggested, Henriette was happiest making music in the studio with Matisse or with one of his children, who visited from time to time.
When Marguerite came to stay in early 1921 following surgery to repair a damaged trachea, Matisse implemented a combined rest cure of sea air and music. He took dance lessons so that they could try out the casino band and escorted her to a concert in a new dress by Madame Bongard that turned heads (‘You can’t be alone with that frock,’ he noted approvingly). For a costume party hosted by Jean Renoir, himself on the brink of stardom as a film director, they dressed up as an Arab prince and princess. Odalisque on a Terrace, painted the next day, shows Marguerite in her party clothes along with Henriette, who was said to be so natural in this type of attire that Matisse promptly drove to Monte Carlo to borrow Bakst’s Shéhérezade costumes from Sergei Diaghilev. When Amélie visited, she and Matisse would often take drives along the coast to watch the Ballets Russes perform or rehearse. She cheerfully reported to her children that their father was singing along to the latest pop songs, which were broadcast on commercial radio from 1923. ‘He’s playing jazz and all the most suggestive tangos on the gramophone’, she wrote. ‘At the moment he’s dancing the tango Poule de luxe in his dressing-gown and his black silk night-cap.’
Inevitably, something of Matisse’s listening experience found its way into his work. ‘I feel this evening as if I’d had three solid hours of music’, Marguerite wrote after contemplating a crate of recent pictures that he had sent to Paris. Marguerite, unlike many commentators at the time and since, understood the implicit unease of the Nice period, so superficially resplendent and sensual. On one memorable occasion Matisse had taken her and Henriette to a secluded spot so he could paint them as odalisques en plein air. Entering the conservative village of Cagne, they took the precaution of covering their harem pants and sheer blouses with coats, only to be greeted by an Arab caravan and three camels shooting on location for a film. This strange theatricality of 1920s Nice was the backdrop to Matisse’s own illusionism. His public reputation had by this stage split in two: the establishment, seeking works that would provide light relief from the economic hardships of the post-war period, eagerly bought into such pleasing pictures of odalisques in pretty frocks; his avant-garde peers, on the other hand, recoiled at his apparent self-indulgence, having instead opted to confront head-on what they saw as the horrors of humankind.
It is true that Matisse’s subjects were, on the surface at least, unchallenging. But beneath their Impressionistic brushstrokes was a subtle critique of the ugly ostentatiousness he encountered in Nice at this time. He was appalled, for example, after watching the patrons of the casino calling throws of up to 10,000 francs at a time. And so he translated these faux values into staged scenarios of opulence, posing his models in various swathes of billowing fabric against backdrops of endlessly shifting curtains, portières and folding screens. The expressions of ennui on their faces seem apt to encompass Matisse’s own weariness and alienation. He made very few public statements during the 1920s, but later told an interviewer that his intention was for paintings such as these to conquer his unease, ‘as Beethoven did in his last symphony.’
Decorative designs and discovering the New World, 1930–9
Matisse’s ‘Nice’ period lasted until 25 February 1930, when he boarded the Île de France and set sail for New York. After more than a decade capturing in soft focus the sensuous surfaces of his beloved textiles, he began to look for an imagery that was more direct, decorative and synthetic. This he would find in the New World. As they cruised up the Hudson on 4 March he was transfixed by the bright lights of Manhattan (‘blocks of black and gold mirrored by night on the water … like a spangled dress’). During the seventy-two hours he spent there he took in a Broadway show, a play in Harlem and the textile collection of the Metropolitan Museum. His American tour continued to Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco, from where he set sail to Tahiti. Buglers bade him farewell from the quayside and gloom set in as he began the tumultuous ten-day passage on a beaten-up old mail boat. But his spirits brightened like the sea itself as they sailed towards the equator, where its colour morphed from a tempestuous blue to the talismanic tone that had stirred his soul since boyhood, ‘a blue like the blue of the morpho butterfly.’
Upon his arrival Matisse promptly reverted to type by stalking the island in search of eye-catching wares: ‘He was endlessly curious at the market, oh là là’, said his hostess Pauline Oturau Aitamai, ‘he missed nothing.’ This attentive scrutiny included watching the locals make the traditional pandanus leaf hats that he would wear for the rest of his days, as well as tapa (bark-cloth), a sample of which he took home (visible in the top right of Figure 19, next to some Bakuba velours). The cultural scene was vibrant: dancers adorned themselves with garlands of hibiscus, bougainvillea and bird-of-paradise; the music was provided by an assortment of slit-log drums (tō‘ere) of various sizes and pitches. But this rich experience did little to appease Matisse’s growing frustration with island life. Too hot to work and irked by the presumption that he had followed in Gauguin’s footsteps to Papeete, Matisse penned a lengthy diatribe to Amélie on 28 April: ‘This country means nothing to me, pictorially speaking. So I give up.’ Although the significance of Tahiti and its sights, sounds, scents and textures did not make themselves known at first, they would later infiltrate his mind’s eye later as he prepared to make his most abstract work.
After docking in Marseille on 31 July Matisse resumed work on The Yellow Dress, which he said had accompanied him at the back of his mind throughout his travels. This final fling with the tactile rendering of textiles readied him for the dramatic departure that followed: a decoration commissioned by Dr Albert C. Barnes on 27 September 1930, for which apparently
he considered nothing but another Dance. Imitating the familiar design techniques of the weavers’ trade, he hired himself an interior decorator to paint sheets of flat colour from which he cut shapes, pinning and re-pinning them in a composition that was in perpetual motion for months. Finally, on three adjacent canvases more than double his height, Matisse sketched his dancers freehand with some charcoal attached to a bamboo cane, as though conducting an orchestra with a baton. ‘It is the drawing, and the harmony and contrast of the colours, that form the volume,’ he said of these canvases, ‘just as in music a number of notes form a harmony more or less rich and profound according to the talent of the musician who has assembled them.’
This was the first of many decorative commissions Matisse worked on during the 1930s, which brought him closer to the applied arts than he had been since he was a boy in Bohain. After Dance, he agreed to illustrate a new edition of Stéphane Mallarmé’s poetry and a year later accepted a commission from Steuben to design a series of crystal bowls and vases, for which he chose the piping adolescent goatherd motif from his Joy of Life. Although professionally prolific, these were not happy times at home. As he always did, Matisse distracted himself with the music hall, meanwhile Amélie stitched her frustrations into embroidered cushions and tapestries. Something of her needlework must have penetrated the shroud of resentment that separated them, for in 1935 Matisse made two tapestries himself: Nymph in the Forest, which featured a faun charming a nymph with his panpipes, and a commission for Marie Cuttoli, who invited Matisse and a number of his contemporaries to inject some modernist verve into the flagging weaving industry at Beauvais. But the young love he depicted was at this point a distant memory and by the end of the decade his marriage to Amélie had dissolved.
When Matisse agreed to design the sets and costumes for Léonide Massine’s Le Rouge et le noir in the spring of 1938, it was clear that this opportunity represented an escape from impending war both in Europe and at home. The creative process was an active collaboration between painter and choreographer. Together they chose Shostakovich’s First Symphony and devised a ballet of purely abstract forms as befits a music with neither narrative nor picturesqueness. Matisse had premiered as a designer for the Ballets Russes in 1920 with The Song of the Nightingale, discussed in the second chapter of this thesis. For this earlier project he sought inspiration amongst the Oriental treasures of the British Museum where, as in Munich, he experienced a revelation: ‘Marvels such as rugs of all kinds, costumes, carpets, faience.’ Once again he employed the cut-and-paste technique of the weavers, making maquettes and building another of his toy theatres to better visualise the overall scheme, but his artistic intentions this second time around were quite different. With Le Rouge et le noir he projected into space and time the same instinctive and organic approach that brought his two-dimensional art into being: ‘I am conscious only of the forces I use,’ he wrote in 1939, ‘and I am driven by an idea that I really only grasp as it grows with the picture.’
Pictorially he was at one with himself, but on the brink of war his family faced its final break-up. Lydia Delectorskaya, by this stage Matisse’s assistant in all matters both personal and professional, had remained in Nice whilst the others fled to Paris, demonstrating both her utter devotion and absolute necessity to his life and work. Usurped and superfluous, Amélie issued an ultimatum but took leave before Matisse could reject her demand for Lydia’s dismissal. Amidst this drama he resumed work on a decorative panel called The Song, commissioned earlier in the year by Nelson Rockefeller. Alone in the echoey acoustic of a barely furnished apartment on the outskirts of Nice, he plundered his memory for a music that could fill the silence of his loneliness. Music was completed in three weeks of solitude as a swansong to his failed marriage and as an accompaniment to Rockefeller’s Song, a work with ‘the amplitude, richness and sustained power of an organ peal’, wrote Pierre to his father. ‘It sustained me in the cruellest and most painful moment of my life’, Matisse wrote back to his son, with whom he shared a firm belief in the restorative powers of music.
Reducing the means: Jazz, the chapel and composing in colour, 1939–54
The upheavals of the war forced Matisse to condense his textile collection such that it could be bundled up at a moment’s notice and resurrected in temporary accommodations as required. The purchases he made at the end-of-season sale on the rue de Boétie – a striped purple robe, several embroidered Romanian blouses and six couture dresses, which included a tartan taffeta dance frock that had won a Grand Prix d’Elégance in Paris (Figure 20) – became the practical nucleus of his wartime workshop. Textiles were not the only means to be reduced at this time. From these splendiferous fabrics Matisse made pictures that were incongruously pared down, almost sublime in their sparseness of pattern and texture. His health in rapid decline, he laboured like the late virtuoso Eugène Ysaÿe, whom he had heard play through his own crippling neuritis in the early 1930s: ‘It seemed as if only the essence of each musical phrase remained’, Matisse wrote. ‘This was how he played at the end of his life. The violinist gave the impression of murmuring with an ease that seemed a little careless. He appeared to be playing for nobody but himself.’ Ysaÿe’s rigorous technique and original interpretations struck a chord with Matisse’s own indomitable belief in both. Likewise, the violinist was known for a maxim that could easily have been the painter’s: ‘Nothing which wouldn’t have for goal emotion, poesy, heart.’
With this almost fatalistic essentialism in mind, in June 1940 he embarked on the manner of working that would see out his days as an artist. As the rest of Paris dug in or fled, Matisse busied himself by cutting and pasting coloured letters and shapes, his scissors gliding and snipping with a certitude his painting never had. This stream of shapes swelled to include plants and sea creatures, as though his memories of Tahiti had finally washed up on the shoreline of his imagination. He told one interviewer that he spent the night of his first Christmas at the Villa le Rêve (where he moved in the May of 1943) drawing a single oak leaf, ‘transposing it from page to page until it grew into an elegant lacy festoon.’ This process of rehearsal and refinement was the necessary preparation for making art ‘live’ and in the moment. Françoise Gilot described how she and Picasso were ‘spellbound, in a state of suspended breathing’ as Matisse performed a solo with his scissors, perhaps as only a musician-turned-artist could.
Far from being a means to an end, it soon became apparent that this cut-paper technique was a creative end in itself. In the summer of 1946, the Czech silk manufacturer Zika Ascher visited the Villa le Rêve and, on the spot, suggested transposing the array of sea creatures he saw pinned to Matisse’s walls into a pair of decorative panels. This could not have been more timely: so dedicated to decoration was Matisse at this point that he had rejected his contract renewal with Paul Rosenberg in the blind hope that commissions would be forthcoming (‘It will be quite some time before I paint canvases again, except occasionally’). The designs for Oceania, the Sky and Oceania, the Sea were ready within two months, closely followed by a second pair destined to be woven as tapestries at Gobelins (Polynesia, the Sky and Polynesia, the Sea). Over the same period Matisse produced various illustrated books, the most significant of which was the one he called Jazz.
In May 1943, Nice was braced for either Nazi occupation or bombardment by the Allied forces. Matisse was ill-prepared to face this turmoil having recently undergone surgery for duodenal cancer, two pulmonary embolisms, a prolapsed stomach and constrictions of the solar plexus. ‘It was in the summer of 1943,’ wrote Aragon, ‘the darkest point of that whole period, that he made Icarus.’ The genesis of Jazz, this preliminary cut-out personifies the fate of a life devoted to daring experimentation, his heart beating a defiant scarlet rhythm within a black form that falls into a deep blue infinity. Like the jubilant yearning of many a jazz refrain, he is simultaneously waxing and waning, at once bold and tragic. These sentiments were strongly resonant with Matisse’s situation. Debilitated yet triumphant, it was as though the discoveries of his career – and even the unpleasant realities of his physical weakness – were merely points of departure from which he could, in his own words, ‘free his unconscious mind.’ Icarus and the other cut-paper characters of Jazz were arranged and rearranged on every surface of his Villa le Rêve, taking their place amongst his latest favourites of the bibliothèque de travail: the Bakuba velours from the Congo, which – as the fourth chapter explores – had so clearly inspired them (Figure 19).
With Jazz behind him, Matisse undertook an inventory of his remaining resources as an artist, concluding that he had reached the limits of painting without yet achieving what he hoped for in terms of radiant colour and light. Keeping his word to Rosenberg, he painted not a single canvas until the completion of his final decorative project, the Chapel of the Rosary at Vence. For one last time Matisse found himself working in the medium of ‘musical’ textiles, happily cutting and pinning the maquettes for nineteen prospective chasubles and decorating them with the symbolic forms of palm leaves, quatrefoils, stars and crosses. All the while he had in mind a certain music: ‘the strident tones of the organ’ and ‘the sweetness of the voices of women, which with their Gregorian chant can become a part of the quivering coloured light of the stained-glass windows.’ Strained by his endeavours, he was unable to attend the consecration of the chapel on 25 June 1951. But the result was a work of art so ‘total’ in its conception that Matisse proclaimed it to be his ‘masterpiece’. It is in this regard – as his summative achievement in visual musicality – that the chapel forms the concluding case study of this thesis.
Life imitating art
As the materials for the chapel mounted up around him, he purged his possessions of anything that was surplus to requirements. For the first time in his life he had stripped down his surroundings like he had his visual art, so that only their essence remained. Once upon a time doves flew freely from room to room and the light was filtered through the pierced fabric screens of his collection. Now his textiles were hung in a manner that would please even minimalist tastes and the last of his fancy pigeons had gone to Picasso. Taking their place were cut-paper birds and leaves, leaping acrobats and mermaids swimming in a pool that spanned the two sides of his bedroom walls (Figure 21). By now physically beyond him, his violin was gathering dust but the air was filled instead with a Bartók string quartet or a Beethoven piano concerto broadcast live on the radio, which he listened to intently. No longer did his visitors bear witness to his internal vision expressed as art: what they saw now was the externalisation of his art expressed as life itself.
‘It is in this sense’, he confirmed in one of his last interviews before his death on 3 November 1954,
that art may be said to imitate nature: by the quality of life that creative work confers upon the work of art. The work will then appear as fertile and as possessed of this same inner vibration, of this same resplendent beauty, that we find in the products of nature.
Vibrations, tones, harmonies, patterns and rhythms were equivalences that Matisse drew between textiles and music, art and life. ‘He clashed his colours together like cymbals’, wrote the critic John Berger upon Matisse’s death, ‘and the effect was like a lullaby.’ In another tribute, André Verdet arrived at a different conclusion: ‘He is a weaver. His pencil is his shuttle, his loom the weft and warp his canvas.’ Neither was wrong. Music and textiles were the threads of continuity throughout Matisse’s art and life. Looking back on his life as an artist, he remarked that ‘I am made up of everything I have seen,’ to which he might have added, ‘and heard.’ Whilst these mutual passions are interwoven at almost every stage of his life, so too is their significance in his work, as we are about to see.