Skip to main content

Portrait Prints

23
to
82
339
122
21
315
310
148
10
339
47
53
11
18
Overall Height
to
Overall Width
to
214
85
48
16
9
9
7
4
3
3
1
1
379
198
183
175
154
87
80
75
70
31
26
23
22
21
13
13
13
11
9
9
41
201
193
33
6
7
4
22
19
17
22
34
23
8
40
128
23
15
15
8
233
131
46
31
17
Portrait Prints For Sale
Color:  White
Paulo en Costume d'Arlequin, Lithograph, Abstract Faces, African Mask, Stripes
Located in Union City, NJ
Artist: Pablo Picasso, After, Spanish (1881 - 1973) Title: Paulo en Costume d'Arlequin (Paulo in Harlequin Costume) Year of Original Artwork: 1926 Medium: Lithograph on Coventry Pape...
Category

1980s Abstract Portrait Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Massena - Etching by A. Ethiou - 1837
Located in Roma, IT
Desaix is an Etching realized by A. Ethiou in 1837. Good conditions. The artwork is realized in a well-balanced composition. the artwork and belongs to the suite suite "AtlasBatt" ...
Category

1860s Modern Portrait Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Soult - Etching by Pierre François Tardieu - 1837
Located in Roma, IT
Soult is an Etching realized in 1837 by Pierre François Tardieu. Good conditions. The artwork is realized in a well-balanced composition. the artwork and belongs to the suite suite...
Category

1830s Modern Portrait Prints

Materials

Etching

Original "The Virgin Queen" US 1-sheet vintage movie poster NSS 55/302
Located in Spokane, WA
Original "The Virgin Queen" vintage movie poster. NSS: 55/302 Archival linen backed with original issued fold marks restored. Linen-backed and in excellent condition. No pape...
Category

1950s Art Nouveau Portrait Prints

Materials

Offset

Icons Letterpress Prints
Located in London, GB
Icons Letterpress Prints (Complete Set), 2023 Four Letterpress prints on cream cotton paper with hand-deckled edges 35.5 x 27.9 Edition of 250 Hand-signed and numbered Mint condition...
Category

21st Century and Contemporary Portrait Prints

Materials

Screen

Etching, 2014. Line etching, 70 x 50cm, limited edition of 30 prints
Located in Tuscany, Pisa
Bobby Dowler (b. 1983, London) studied Filmmaking at FH Salzburg and Southampton Institute/Solent University and Art and Design at Camberwell College, London. Bobby is a painter work...
Category

2010s Portrait Prints

Materials

Etching

Portrait of Vollard III
Located in San Antonio, TX
Vintage 1970s Black and White plate after the original by Pablo Picasso for the Vollard Suite. This artwork is highly desirable due to its age and artistic significance to both Picas...
Category

1970s Portrait Prints

Materials

Black and White

Reclining Nude, Left Leg Raised - Lithograph - 2007
Located in Roma, IT
Reclining Nude, Left Leg Raised is a lithograph from the portfolio " Erotica " after Egon Schiele, realized in 2007. It is a reproduction of the homonym pencil drawing realized by ...
Category

Early 2000s Modern Portrait Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Original 'Quality Workmanship, A Sound Foundation...' vintage poster
Located in Spokane, WA
Original vintage poster: Quality Workmanship A sound Foundation on which to build one's future Cooperative Thoughtful Skilful Dependable Careful This lithograph was printed in 1940 by Elliott Service in NYC. Very good condition with only a minor tear on the bottom, which was laid down during linen-backing. Similar in design to Mather’s Work Incentive posters...
Category

1940s American Modern Portrait Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Original "Keep 'em Flying!" vintage poster, 1941
By Cecil Calvert Beall
Located in Spokane, WA
Keep 'em Flying!, artist: C. C. Beall: original linen-backed, excellent condition, World War Two vintage poster. The poster of Uncle Sam is constructed with several vignettes of workers, soldiers, scientists, the U. S. flag, and more. I have provided several details of this fabulous and uniquely designed vintage poster. The 1941 U.S. World War II (WWII) Home Front poster ("Keep 'em flying-Airplanes-flags-Machines-production-Nothing lags. Put your shoulder To the wheel; Courage staunch With nerves of steel. Greet each day, Or pledge a toast-"Keep 'em flying" is our boast. Here's a slogan For us all-An answer to Our country's call. Keep 'em flying; Keep 'em clear. The time is ripe, The time is HERE To pull together-One bold front-Each one prepared To do his stunt. Workers and The men who hire-Housewives-children-All aspire To help and work With little pause-One mind, one heart, One goal, one cause. So-'KEEP 'EM FLYING!' - Jack Childs"; "Presented by the United States Army Recruiting Service") featuring collage art of soldiers and other personnel overlaid with an image of Uncle Sam by Cecil Calvert Beall. Incredible design with the military, red cross nurse, American Flag, chemist, pilots, farmer, steel worker, and Navy guns...
Category

1940s American Modern Portrait Prints

Materials

Offset

Original "BEWARE Spreading Vital Informaton .. SILENCE" vintage WWII poster
Located in Spokane, WA
Original "Beware Spreading Vital Information Will Undermine Our War Effort. Do your Part In Silence" vintage World War 2 poster. Ori...
Category

1940s American Impressionist Portrait Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Untitled (Portrait)
Located in Fairlawn, OH
Untitled (Portrait) Drypoint printed in blue-black graphite mixed with silver, 1974 Signed and dated lower ight (see photo) From: Series entitled Six Drypoints Edition: 23 (4/23) Numbered lower left (see photo) Print Shop: Crown Point Press Printer: Jeannie Fine Publisher: Parasol Press, New York Note: A portfolio is in the collection of the National Gallery, Australia, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco- de Young/Legion of Honor, Davis Museum at Wellesley College and the Yale University Art Gallery. Condition: Excellent Image/Plate size: 6 3/8 x 5 3/8 inches Sheet size: 24 x 20 inches From a portfolio of six drypoints, printed with unqiue combination of blue-black graphite shavings combined with silver to create the appearence of an original drawing. I know of no other artist to use a similar printing technique. William Bailey studied art at the University of Kansas, Yale University and Yale School of Art where he studied with Josef Albers receiving his MFA in 1957. Mr. Bailey’s first exhibition in New York was at Robert Schoelkopf Gallery in 1968, where he showed regularly until its closing in 1990. During the 90’s he exhibited at the Andre Emmerich Gallery and on its closing, exhibited at the Robert Miller Gallery. In 2004 Bailey moved to the Betty Cuningham Gallery where his most recent exhibition was held from April 30 - June 11, 2016. Mr. Bailey’s work has been exhibited extensively in both America and Europe. He is represented in the collections of The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modern Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, among others. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in painting in 1965. Mr. Bailey was elected to The National Academy of Design in 1983 and to The American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1986. Mr. Bailey taught at The Yale School of Art from 1958 to 1962 and from 1969 to 1995. He has also taught at The Cooper Union, University of Pennsylvania and Indiana University. He maintains studios in New Haven and in Umbertide, Italy. Courtesy Betty Cunningham Gallery Tribute to William Bailey THE NEW YORK TIMES William Bailey, whose pristine, idealized still lifes and female nudes made him one of the leading figures in the return of figurative art in the 1980s, died on April 13 at his home in Branford, Conn. He was 89. His death was confirmed by his daughter, Alix Bailey. Beyond his painting, Mr. Bailey influenced generations of students in his many years as a teacher at the Yale School of Art. In some of his best-known work, Mr. Bailey arranged simple objects — the eggs, bowls, bottles and vases that he once called “my repertory company” — along a severe horizontal shelf, or on a plain table, swathing them in a breathless, deceptively serene atmosphere heavy with mystery. William Bailey, Modernist Figurative Painter, Dies at 89 He swathed his nudes and still lifes of eggs, vases, bottles and bowls in a breathless, deceptively serene atmosphere heavy with mystery. The painter William Bailey in 2009. He was never given a career survey in a major museum, but his influence, particulary on students at Yale, was deep. Ford Bailey By William Grimes for the New York Times April 18, 2020 William Bailey, whose pristine, idealized still lifes and female nudes made him one of the leading figures in the return of figurative art in the 1980s, died on April 13 at his home in Branford, Conn. He was 89. His death was confirmed by his daughter, Alix Bailey. Beyond his painting, Mr. Bailey influenced generations of students in his many years as a teacher at the Yale School of Art. In some of his best-known work, Mr. Bailey arranged simple objects — the eggs, bowls, bottles and vases that he once called “my repertory company” — along a severe horizontal shelf, or on a plain table, swathing them in a breathless, deceptively serene atmosphere heavy with mystery. His muted ochres, grays and powdery blues conjured up a still, timeless world inhabited by Platonic forms, recognizable but uncanny, in part because he painted from imagination rather than life. “They are at once vividly real and objects in dream, and it is the poetry of this double life that elevates all this humble crockery to the realm of pictorial romance,” Hilton Kramer wrote in The New York Times in 1979. Mr. Bailey’s female figures, some clothed in a simple shift or robe and others partly or entirely nude, are disconcertingly impassive, implacable and unreadable, fleshly presences breathing an otherworldly air. The critic Mark Stevens, writing in Newsweek in 1982, credited Mr. Bailey with helping to “restore representational art to a position of consequence in modern painting.” But his version of representation was entirely idiosyncratic, seemingly traditional but in fact “a modernism so contrarian,” the artist Alexi Worth wrote in a catalog essay for the William Harrison Bailey was born on Nov. 17, 1930, in Council Bluffs, Iowa. His father, Willard, worked in radio advertising and moved the family from city to city in the Midwest. Bill was in his early teens when his father died. His mother, Marjorie (Cheyney) Bailey, was a homemaker who later worked as an accountant for her second husband, Fred...
Category

1970s Realist Portrait Prints

Materials

Drypoint

Original "Proper Care Before Birth" means More Babies vintage poster
Located in Spokane, WA
Original “Proper Care Before Birth” vintage poster. Archival linen backed in excellent condition, ready to frame. Size 20.5” x 27”; circa 1917. The Original "Proper Care Before Births" vintage poster is a rare find for collectors of World War 1 memorabilia...
Category

1910s American Realist Portrait Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Original 1953 "The Jazz Singer" half-sheet vintage movie poster Danny Thomas
Located in Spokane, WA
Title: The Jazz Singer - Original 1953 US Half-Sheet Vintage Movie Poster Features:- - Warner Bros: Jubilant New Production of The Jazz Singer, in Techn...
Category

1950s American Modern Portrait Prints

Materials

Offset

Original "The Walls of Jericho" vintage movie poster US half sheet
Located in Spokane, WA
The Walls of Jericho." This is an original 1948 half-sheet movie poster for the film " The poster features a striking image of Cornel Wilde and Linda Darnell in battle and has been ...
Category

1940s American Realist Portrait Prints

Materials

Offset

Original "Campionato del Mondo, Tiro al Piccione" vintage sports poster
Located in Spokane, WA
Original poster Italian lithograph. Tira Al Piccion - Roma. Skeet Shooting. VII World Championship “Tiro a Piccione” pre-World War II Olympic style poster. Powerful pre-world War II poster. This shows the American flag flying next to the Nazi flag for the skeet shooting championship in Italy. Note that the year 1935 corresponds with the fascist year date of XIV-XV. Museum linen backed. The USA flag is sitting right next to the German Nazi...
Category

1930s Art Deco Portrait Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Original "Young Man with a Horn" vintage US half-sheet movie poster
Located in Spokane, WA
Original movie poster: "Young Man with a Horn" Original Vintage Movie The film "Young Man with a Horn" originally came out in 1950 and starred Kirk Douglas as the titular character...
Category

1950s American Modern Portrait Prints

Materials

Offset

Figure With Dog - Lithograph - 1990
Located in Roma, IT
This lithograph from the portfolio "Egon Schiele" is a reproduction of " Edith Schiele mit Hund Lord ", an original artwork realized by Egon Schiele in 1917. The portfolio, that incl...
Category

1990s Modern Portrait Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Sketch of Anne
Located in Fairlawn, OH
Sketch of Anne Lithograph, 1923-1924 Signed and titled by the artist, signed by his printer Bolton Brown Edition: 42 Printed by Bolton Brown (see photo of his signature in pencil) Pr...
Category

1920s Ashcan School Portrait Prints

Materials

Lithograph

David Hockney portrait drawing vintage Exhibition poster Graves Art Gallery '80
Located in New York, NY
The portrait of the David Hockney’s mother featured on this vintage David Hockney poster is currently on view at the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition David Hockney: Drawing from Life. This poster was created for the exhibition 'Hockney's Progress: Paintings, Drawings, Prints, Theatre Designs', held at the Graves Art Gallery in Sheffield, 19 September...
Category

1980s Realist Portrait Prints

Materials

Lithograph

ZSA ZSA Signed Lithograph, 1920's Fashion Illustration, Art Deco, Black Cape
Located in Union City, NJ
Zsa Zsa is an original hand pulled color lithograph by the Russian-born French artist Romain de Tirtoff (23 November 1892 – 21 April 1990) known by the pseudonym Erté. Erté, who is b...
Category

1970s Art Deco Portrait Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Original "Mr. Deeds goes to Town" vintage Belgium movie poster
Located in Spokane, WA
Original vintage movie poster: “MR. DEEDS GOES TO TOWN.” 'L'extravagant Mr. Deeds' Linen-backed Belgium movie poster. Longfellow Deeds lives in a small town, leading a small-town...
Category

1930s American Modern Portrait Prints

Materials

Offset

Original "We the Peoples of the United Nations" 1945 vintage poster
Located in Spokane, WA
Original United Nations 1945 vintage poster. We the Peoples of the United Nations" The opening phrase "We the peoples of the United Nations.", echoing the preamble of the United States Constitution...
Category

1940s American Modern Portrait Prints

Materials

Offset

Petits Contes à ma Sœur - Lithograph by Hégésippe Moreau - 1838
Located in Roma, IT
Petits Contes à ma Sœur is a Lithograph on paper realized by Hégésippe Moreau in 1838. The artwork is in good condition. Hégésippe Moreau (1810-1838) was a French lyric poet. The r...
Category

1830s Modern Portrait Prints

Materials

Lithograph

The Figures - Lithograph - 1921
Located in Roma, IT
The Figures is a lithograph print on paper, realized after Jean Paul Sauget for Maurice Magre's Les Soirs d'Opium. Published in 1921. Good conditions.
Category

1970s Modern Portrait Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Portrait - Woodcut after Jean Paul Sauget - 1921
Located in Roma, IT
Portrait is a woodcut print print on paper, realized after Jean Paul Sauget for Maurice Magre's Les Soirs d'Opium. Published in 1921. Good conditions.
Category

1920s Contemporary Portrait Prints

Materials

Woodcut

PARIS REVIEW
Located in Aventura, FL
Screen print in colors on wove paper. Hand signed, numbered & dated by the artist in pencil. Published by The Paris Review, New York. Edition of 200 (there were also 30 artist's pro...
Category

1980s Pop Art Portrait Prints

Materials

Screen, Paper

Original "Drafted Men, War Savings Stamps 5 Dollars" vintage American poster
Located in Spokane, WA
Original “Drafted Men” W. S.S. 5 Dollars vintage poster. World War 1. Linen backed and restored. This poster is rare and doesn’t appear in the Library of ...
Category

1910s American Realist Portrait Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Petits Contes à ma Sœur - Lithograph by Hégésippe Moreau - 1838
Located in Roma, IT
Petits Contes à ma Sœur is a Lithograph on paper realized by Hégésippe Moreau in 1838. The artwork is in good condition. Hégésippe Moreau (1810-1838) was a French lyric poet. The r...
Category

1830s Modern Portrait Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Original "RADIO L. M. T. La Meilleure Tonalite" vintage French radio poster
Located in Spokane, WA
Original poster: Radio L.M.T. "La Meilleure Tonalite". Elle l'aime tant. French antique vintage poster for the L. M. T. Radio. The radio wit...
Category

1940s American Modern Portrait Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Petits Contes à ma Sœur - Lithograph by Hégésippe Moreau - 1838
Located in Roma, IT
Petits Contes à ma Sœur is a Lithograph on paper realized by Hégésippe Moreau in 1838. The artwork is in good condition. Hégésippe Moreau (1810-1838) was a French lyric poet. The r...
Category

1830s Modern Portrait Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Petits Contes à ma Sœur - Lithograph by Hégésippe Moreau - 1838
Located in Roma, IT
Petits Contes à ma Sœur is a Lithograph on paper realized by Hégésippe Moreau in 1838. The artwork is in good condition. Hégésippe Moreau (1810-1838) was a French lyric poet. The r...
Category

1830s Modern Portrait Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Petits Contes à ma Sœur - Lithograph by Hégésippe Moreau - 1838
Located in Roma, IT
Petits Contes à ma Sœur is a Lithograph on paper realized by Hégésippe Moreau in 1838. The artwork is in good condition. Hégésippe Moreau (1810-1838) was a French lyric poet. The r...
Category

1830s Modern Portrait Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Petits Contes à ma Sœur - Lithograph by Hégésippe Moreau - 1838
Located in Roma, IT
Petits Contes à ma Sœur is a Lithograph on paper realized by Hégésippe Moreau in 1838. The artwork is in good condition. Hégésippe Moreau (1810-1838) was a French lyric poet. The r...
Category

1830s Modern Portrait Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Petits Contes à ma Sœur - Lithograph by Hégésippe Moreau - 1838
Located in Roma, IT
Petits Contes à ma Sœur is a Lithograph on paper realized by Hégésippe Moreau in 1838. The artwork is in good condition. Hégésippe Moreau (1810-1838) was a French lyric poet. The r...
Category

1830s Modern Portrait Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Caitlin
Located in New York, NY
Caitlin 2019 5-color photopolymer letterpress relief print of hand-torn kozo paper (Edition of 300) 20.5 x 13.5 inches This work is offered by CLAMP in New York City.
Category

2010s Contemporary Portrait Prints

Materials

Screen

Fillette Couronee au Bateau, Lithograph, Girl with Sailboat, Stick Kid Portrait
Located in Union City, NJ
Artist: Pablo Picasso, After, Spanish (1881 - 1973) Title: Fillette Couronee au Bateau, #1-B Year of Original Artwork: 1939 Medium: Lithograph on Coventry Paper, 100% acid free Edition of 1000, unnumbered, estate approved printed signature Print Size: 29 x 21.75 in. Fillette Couronee au Bateau is a limited edition lithograph re-created after an original painting from the estate Collection of Marina Picasso, Picasso's grand-daughter. Printed using hand drawn lithographic plates(not a photo reproduction or digital print) on archival heavy weight Coventry printmaking paper, 100% acid free. Edition was produced in accordance with the Picasso family under the supervision of Marcel Salinas, master chromist who worked closely with Pablo Picasso during his lifetime. Bears the estate approved printed signature of Picasso on lower margin. Lithograph is in excellent condition, never been framed or mounted. Picasso's - Fillette Couronee au Bateau is a colorful, child art style, painted abstract portrait of a young girl wearing a crown on her head carrying her toy sailboat...
Category

1980s Abstract Portrait Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Orignal " Oreal Sirene et Phoque" 1940s coffee poster
Located in Spokane, WA
Original poster: SIRENE et PHOQUE; artist: P. Scheiurllez. 1940's original antique French lithograph coffee poster. Original lithographic, archival ...
Category

1940s Feminist Portrait Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Guitar Player- Lithograph by Alfredo Romagnoli - 1970s
Located in Roma, IT
Guitar Player is a Lithograph realized by Alfredo Romagnoli in 1970s. The artwork is in good condition on a white cardboard. Hand-signed by the artist on the lower right corner. Alfredo Romagnoli (January 5, 1915 in Genzano di Roma - March 21, 2008 in Rome) was an Italian painter. He studied first at the School of Sacred Art...
Category

1970s Contemporary Portrait Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Original Lithograph - Henri Matisse - Apollinaire
Located in Collonge Bellerive, Geneve, CH
Original Lithograph - Henri Matisse - Apollinaire Artist : Henri MATISSE 13 x 10 inches Edition: 151/330 References : Duthuit-Matisse Catalogue raisonné 31 MATISSE'S BIOGRAPHY YOUTH AND EARLY EDUCATION Henri Emile Benoît Matisse was born in a tiny, tumbledown weaver's cottage on the rue du Chêne Arnaud in the textile town of Le Cateau-Cambrésis at eight o'clock in the evening on the last night of the year, 31 December 1869 (Le Cateau-Cambrésis is in the extreme north of France near the Belgian border). The house had two rooms, a beaten earth floor and a leaky roof. Matisse said long afterwards that rain fell through a hole above the bed in which he was born. Matisse’s ancestors had lived in the area for centuries before the convulsive social and industrial upheavals of the nineteenth century. Matisse grew up in a world that was still detaching itself from a way of life in some ways unchanged since Roman times. The coming of the railway had put Bohain on the industrial map, but people still traveled everywhere on foot or horseback. Matisse’s father, Émile Hippolyte Matisse, was a grain merchant whose family were weavers. His mother, Anna Heloise Gerard, was a daughter of a long line of well-to-do tanners. Warmhearted, outgoing, capable and energetic, she was small and sturdily built with the fashionable figure of the period: full breasts and hips, narrow waist, neat ankles and elegant small feet. She had fair skin, broad cheekbones and a wide smile. "My mother had a face with generous features," said her son Henri, who always spoke of her with particular tenderness of the sensitivity. Throughout the forty years of her marriage, she provided unwavering, rocklike support to her husband and her sons. Matisse later said: "My mother loved everything I did." He grew up in nearby Bohain-en-Vermandois, an industrial textile center, until the age of ten, when his father sent him to St. Quentin for lycée. Anna Heloise worked hard. She ran the section of her husband's shop that sold housepaints, making up the customers' orders and advising on color schemes. The colors evidently left a lasting impression on Henri. The artist himself later said he got his color sense from his mother, who was herself an accomplished painter on porcelain, a fashionable art form at the time. Henri was the couple’s first son. The young Matisse was an awkward youth who seemed ill-adapted to the rigors of the North; in particular, he hated the gelid winters. He was a pensive child and by his own account he was a dreamy, frail and not outstandingly bright. In later life he never lost his feeling for his native soil, for seeds and growing things he had encountered in his youth. The fancy pigeons he kept in Nice more than half a century after he left home recalled the weavers' pigeon-lofts tucked away behind even the humblest house in Bohain. Matisse's childhood memories were of a stern upbringing. "Be quick!" "Look out!" "Run along!" "Get cracking!" were the refrains that rang in his ears as a boy. In later years when survival itself depended on habits of thrift and self-denial, the artist prided himself on being a man of the North. When Matisse in turn had children of his own to bring up, he chided himself for any lapse in discipline or open display of tenderness as weakness on his part. In 1887 he went to Paris to study law, working as a court administrator in Le Cateau-Cambrésis after gaining his qualification. Although he considered law as tedious, he nonetheless passed the bar in 1888 with distinction and began his practice begrudgingly. Once Matisse finished school, his father, a much more practical man, arranged for his son to obtain a clerking position at a law office. PAINTING: BEGINNINGS Matisse’s discovery of his true profession came about in an unusual manner. Following an attack of appendicitis, he began to paint in 1889, when his mother had brought him art supplies during the period of convalescence. He said later, “From the moment I held the box of colors in my hands, I knew this was my life. I threw myself into it like a beast that plunges towards the thing it loves.” Matisse’s mother was the first to advise her son not to adhere to the “rules” of art, but rather listen to his own emotions. Matisse was so committed to his art that he later extended a warning to his fiancée, Amélie Parayre, whom he later married: “I love you dearly, mademoiselle; but I shall always love painting more.” Matisse had discovered "a kind of paradise" as he later described it. His drastic change of profession deeply disappointed his father. Two years later in 1891 Matisse returned to Paris to study art at the Académie Julian and became a student of William-Adolphe Bouguereau. After a discouraging year at the Académie Julian, he left in disgust at the overly perfectionist style of teaching there. Afterwards he trained with Gustave Moreau, an artist who nurtured more progressive leanings. In both studios, as was usual, students drew endless figure studies from life. From Bouguereau, he learned the fundamental lessons of classical painting. His one art-schooled technical standby, almost a fetish, was the plumb line. No matter how odd the angles in any Matisse, the verticals are usually dead true. Moreau was a painter who despised the "art du salon", so Matisse was destined, in a certain sense, to remain an "outcast" of the art world. He initially failed his drawing exam for admission to the École des Beaux-Arts, but persisted and was finally accepted. Matisse began painting still-lives and landscapes in the traditional Flemish style, at which he achieved reasonable proficiency. Most of his early works employ a dark palette and tend to be gloomy. Chardin was one of Matisse's most admired painters having made four the French still-life master paintings in the Louvre. Although he executed numerous copies after the old masters he also studied contemporary art. His first experimentations earned him a reputation as the rebellious member of his studio classes. In 1896, Matisse was elected as an associate member of the Société Nationale, which meant that each year he could show paintings at the Salon de la Société without having to submit them for review. In the same year he exhibited 5 paintings in the salon of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, and the state bought two of his paintings. This was the first and almost only recognition he received in his native country during his lifetime. In 1897 and 1898, he visited the painter John Peter Russell on the island Belle Île off the coast of Brittany. Russell introduced him to Impressionism and to the work of Van Gogh who had been a good friend of Russell but was completely unknown at the time. Matisse's style changed completely, and he would later say "Russell was my teacher, and Russell explained color theory to me." Matisse also observed Russell's and other artists' stable marriages. This probably influenced him to find in Amélie Noellie Parayre, his future wife, his anchor. The Dinner Table (1897) was Matisse’s first masterpiece, and he had spent the entire winter working on the oeuvre. Though the Salon displayed the piece, they hung the work in a poor location, disgusted by what they considered its radical, Impressionist aspects. Caroline Joblaud was Matisse's early lover for four years during his initial struggles to affirm his artistic direction and professional career. Caroline (also called Camille) gave Matisse his first daughter Marguerite in 1894, who after Matisse's marriage to Amélie Noellie Parayre was warmly accepted contrary to conventional hostility such arrangements provoked. Caroline posed various times for the artist’s compositions while Marguerite served many times as a model for Matisse throughout his life. MARRIAGE WITH AMÉLIE NOELLIE PARAYRE The Matisses of Bohain and the Parayres of Beauzelle had outwardly nothing in common, and there was no reason why Matisse and Amélie should ever have met. But in October 1897 Matisse went to a wedding in Paris and happened to sit next to her at the uproarious banquet that followed. There had been no banal flirtation between them, even when the wine flowed, each recognized the other as true metal, and when they got up from the table she held out her hand to Henri Matisse in a way that he never forgot. Matisse at that time was not yet the professorial figure of legend. He was known as a prankster, as a ribald and anti-clerical songster, and as someone who had once broken up a café concert performance just for the hell of it. Amélie's relatives operated at that time within a social, intellectual, and political context of which Matisse had had no previous experience. They stood for free thinking, for the separation of church and state, and for the secularization of the French educational system. Her family, better off that that of Matisse, provided the support he needed for the budding artist. When Matisse married Amélie in January 1898, they had been introduced only three months after. Amélie's Aunt Noélie and two of her brothers ran a successful women's shop called the Grande Maison des Modes. Before her marriage, Amélie had shown a gift for designing, making, and modeling hats for a fashionable clientele. In June 1899, she found a partner and opened a shop of her own on the rue de Châteaudun. This allowed Henri and herself to live, with Marguerite, in a tiny two-room apartment on the same street. Madame Matisse, fervently loyal, would play a fundamental role in the life and career of the artist for more than 40 years. Marguerite was to become her father's lifetime mainstay In 1902 disaster struck. Amélie’s parents were disgraced and financially ruined in a spectacular scandal of national scope, as the unsuspecting employees of a woman whose financial empire was based on fraud. Thanks to his early years in a lawyer's office, Matisse was able to busy himself to great effect in the organization of his father-in-law's defense. When all about him lost their heads, burst into tears, and felt more than sorry for themselves, Henri Matisse dealt with their problems one by one. The ordeal had taken its toll, in more than one way. His doctors ordered Matisse to go to Bohain and take two months' complete rest. Amélie had lost both her hat shop and the apartment on the rue de Châteaudun. For the first time, Henri, Amélie and the three children were united in Bohain, having nowhere else to go. Hillary Spurling, one of Matisse’s biographers, asserts that Amélie’s memories of that public disgrace nurtured a “suspicion of the outside world” that would always mark the Matisse family. The Matisse family formed a kind of hermetic unit which revolved around the artist’s work and profession. They fitted their activities according his breaks and work sessions. Silence was essential. Even during the years when Matisse lived mostly alone in Nice, an annual ritual of unpacking, stretching, framing and hanging ended with the whole family settling down to respond to the paintings. The conference might last several days. Then the dealers were admitted. Matisse and his wife had had two sons, Jean (born 1899) and Pierre (born 1900). He was not always in peace with his family. He wrote that their views were not always in accord “which disturbs me considerably in my work, for which I require the most complete calm and from those how surround me, a serenity that I cannot find here. I intend to move to a village a few league away.” Pierre, his brother, Jean, and Marguerite remained close to their father through every vicissitude, and Matisse, in his last invalid years, was devoted to his several grandchildren. In 1899, at a time when his paintings displayed rebellious talent but not much clear direction, Matisse began attending classes in clay modeling and sculpture. Assigned to copy one of the sculptural masterpieces in the Louvre, he selected Jaguar Devouring a Hare a violently precise work by Antoine-Louis Barye. Later, whenever his paintings seemed stuck, he turned to sculpture to organize his thoughts and sensations. Influenced by the works of the post-Impressionists Paul Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh and Paul Signac, and also by Japanese art, Matisse made color a crucial element of his paintings. Matisse said, "In modern art, it is indubitably to Cézanne that I owe the most." By studying Cézanne’s fragmented planes -- which stretched the idea of the still life to a forced contemplation of color surfaces themselves -- Matisse was able to reconstruct his own philosophy of the still life. Many of his paintings from 1899 to 1905 make use of a pointillist technique adopted from Signac. In 1898, he went to London to study the paintings of J. M. W. Turner and then went on a trip to Corsica. After years in poverty, Matisse went through his "dark period" (1902-03), moved briefly to naturalism, went back to a dark palette and told friends in 1903 that he had lost all desire to paint and had almost decided to give up. Fortunately, Matisse was able to earn some money painting a frieze for the World Fair at the Grand Palais in Paris. He also traveled extensively in the early 1900s when tourism was still a new idea. Brought on by railroad, steamships, and other forms of transportation that appeared during the industrial revolution, travel became a popular pursuit. As a cultured tourist, he developed his art with regular doses of travel. FAUVISM Matisse's career can be divided into several periods that changed stylistically, but his underlying aim always remained the same: to discover "the essential character of things" and to produce an art "of balance, purity, and serenity," as he himself put it. The changing studio environments seemed always to have had a significant effect on the style of his work. In these first years of struggle Matisse set his revolutionary artistic agenda. He disregarded perspective, abolished shadows, repudiating the academic distinction between line and color. He was attempting to overturn a way of seeing evolved and accepted by the Western world for centuries by substituting a conscious subjectivity in the place of the traditional illusion of objectivity . Matisse hit his stride in the avant-garde art world in the first years of the new decade. He explored the modern art scene through frequent visits to galleries such as Durand-Ruel and Vollard, where he was exposed to work by Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, and Vincent van Gogh. Matisse’s first solo exhibition took place in 1904, without much success. In 16 May 1905 he arrived in the charming Catalan port of Collioure, in the south of France. He soon invited the painter André Derain (1880-1954), 11 years his junior, to join him. By 1905, Matisse was considered spearhead the Fauve movement in France, characterized by its spontaneity and roughness of execution as well as use of raw color straight from the palette to the canvas. Matisse combined pointillist color and Cézanne’s way of structuring pictorial space stroke by stroke to develop Fauvism - a way less of seeing the world than of feeling it with one’s eyes. When the Fauve summer drew to an end, Derain left Collioure with 30 paintings, 20 drawings and some 50 sketches, never to return, while Matisse departed some days later bringing back to Paris 15 finished paintings, 40 aquarelles, over 100 drawings. He returned Collioure in the summers of 1906, 1907, 1911 and 1914. The lure of the sun would prove always to have powers of restoration to the artist throughout his life particularly after periods of great emotional exertion. When Fauvist works were first exhibited Salon d'Automne in Paris they created a scandal. Eyewitness accounts tell of laughter emanating from room VII where they were displayed. Gertrud Stein, one of Matisse's most important future supporters, reported that people scratched at the canvases in derision. "A pot of paint has been flung in the face of the public" was the reaction by the critic Camille Mauclair. Louis Vauxcelles described the work with the historic phrase "Donatello au milieu des fauves!" (Donatello among the wild beasts), referring to a Renaissance-type sculpture that shared the room with them. His comment was printed on 17 October 1905 in Gil Blas, a daily newspaper, and passed into popular usage. Derain himself later called the Fauves' color "sticks of dynamite." The painting that was singled out for attacks was Matisse's Woman with a Hat, a portrait of Madame Matisse. This picture was bought be was bought by Gertrude and Leo Stein, a fact which had a very positive effect on Matisse who was suffering demoralization from the bad reception of his work. Matisse continued his experiments in Collioure, visible in the painting The Open Window and the View of Collioure , also a characteristic work of Fauvism in its raw color and disregard for details. Both of these works of the landscape in the French Mediterranean present a distinct development towards the spontaneous and uninhibited style. Other than André Derain, Georges Braque, Raoul Dufy and Maurice Vlaminck were also members of the Fauve movement. However, Matisse’s intimate friends among artists were mostly easygoing minor painters, such as Albert Marquet. Matisse’s temperamental aloneness made him prey to vertiginous depressions. He later recalled a breakdown that he underwent in Spain, in 1910: “My bed shook, and from my throat came a little high-pitched cry that I could not stop.” From the onset of is career women were from one of the cardinal motifs of the artist's production. His Joy of Life (1906) draws us into the world of hallucinatory vividness composed of nymphs set in an idyllic open fields dressed in pure color and sensual outline. Two women lounge in the sunlight while two more chat on the edge of the forest. One crouches to pick some flowers while her companion weaves a chain of them into her hair. A couple embraces each other while another group engages in a lively round-dance in the distance. In this way, Joy of Life depicts woodland nymphs engaging in a celebration of their life, their womanhood, and their sexuality. Due to the recurrent incidence of nude women and intensely sensual interpretation many observers have assumed that as a man Matisse must have been a hedonist. On the contrary, historic examination demonstrates that in reality, he was rather a self-abnegating Northerner who lived only to work, and did so in chronic anguish, recurrent panic, and amid periodic breakdowns. While Picasso recompensed himself, as he went along, with gratifications of intellectual and erotic play Matisse did not. In an age of ideologies, Matisse dodged all ideas except perhaps one: that art is life by other means. Matisse’s uninhibited celebration of women is often believed to have initiated from Cézanne’s painting Three Bathers (1882) (which he had acquired for himself along with a Van Gogh and a Gauguin). However, Matisse depicts women as nurturing, welcoming, and unlike the forbidding, massive clay-like presence of those of Paul Cézanne. FAME The decline of the Fauvist movement, after 1906, did nothing to deter the rise of Matisse. From 1906 -1917 he lived in Paris and established his home, studio, and school at Hôtel Biron. Among his neighbors is sculptor Auguste Rodin, writer Jean Cocteau, and dancer Isadora Duncan. Many of his finest works were created in this period, when he was an active part of the great gathering of artistic talent in Montparnasse, even though he did not quite fit in with his conservative appearance and strict bourgeois work habits. In fact, the aim of Matisse’s art was something less than revolutionary. In 1908, in a famous statement drawn from “Notes of a Painter,” Matisse declared as his ideal an art “for every mental worker, for the businessman as well as the man of letters, for example, a soothing, calming influence on the mind, something like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue.” Matisse's personal habits were incredibly regular. On a typical day rose early and worked all morning with a second work session after lunch, followed by violin practice, a simple supper (vegetable soup, two hard-boiled eggs, salad and a glass of wine) and an early bedtime. In 1906, he created a series of 12 lithographs, all variations on the theme of a seated nude. He chose to share his graphic work with the public almost immediately. The lithographs were exhibited at the Druet Gallery in Paris the same year that they were produced, and the woodcuts were shown at the Salon des Independants in the spring of 1907. In 1907 Appolinaire, commenting about Matisse in an article published in La Falange, said, "We are not here in the presence of an extravagant or an extremist undertaking: Matisse's art is eminently reasonable." Notwithstanding newly-won fame, Matisse's work continued to encounter vehement criticism and it was difficult for him to provide for his family. His controversial 1907 painting Blue Nude was burned in effigy at the Armory Show in Chicago in 1913. Contrary to the fate of the Impressionists, Matisse and other Fauves were able to exhibit in art galleries. In 1908 Paul Cassirer, the German art dealer and editor who played a significant role in the promotion of the work the French Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, staged an exhibit of Matisse’s works in Berlin. In the same year the American photographer Alfred Stieglitz in New York organized him one-man show in his tiny Manhattan gallery called 291 which effectively introduced Matisse the powerful American art market. In the first decade of his notoriety as the leader of the Fauves, Matisse was more admired by foreigners than by the French. It was, after all, the Russians and the Americans who acquired significant collections of his early work almost as quickly as it was created. The great Matisses we see in the Paris museums today were mostly acquired after the artist's death in lieu of death duties. It took the French a good deal longer to understand Matisse's greatness-longer, certainly, than the international cadre of aspiring talents that flocked to his classes when he was still one of the most controversial figures in the Paris avant-garde. In the summer of 1907, Matisse and his wife went on a long trip to italy "for work and Pleasure," visiting Venice and Padua, where they admired Giotto's frescos. In Florence the were the guests of the Steins in their villa in Fiesole. From this base matisse visited Arezzo, to study Piero della Francesca, and Siena, attracted by the early Sienese painters, especially, Duccio. PICASSO, GERTRUDE STEIN AND THE CONE SISTERS During the first decade of the 20th century Americans in Paris Gertrude Stein, her brothers Leo Stein, Michael Stein and Michael's wife Sarah took keen interest in Matisse's art. In addition, Gertrude Stein's two friends from Baltimore. Clarabel and Etta Cone, became major patrons of Matisse and Picasso, collecting hundreds of their works.The Cone Sisters acquired their first Matisse in 1906 and, during the next four decades, went on to form one of the world's great collections of his art. The Cone Collection not only contains major works from every phase of Matisse's long career but reflects the sisters' special interest in his Nice period, when a new complexity of form and psychology entered the ever intense surface allure of his paintings. In April of 1906 during a gathering at the house of the legendary Gertrude Stein, Matisse was introduced to Pablo Picasso who was 11 years younger. Picasso and Matisse were poles apart aesthetically and their life styles were no less so. Matisse was markedly taller and more polished than the stocky, cocky Catalan, was then ruler of the turbulent Paris avant-garde art scene. The two were said to have always been looking over their shoulders at each other. It is well-known that after their rivalry grew, sides were taken. Picasso later said: "No one has ever looked at Matisse's paintings more carefully than I; and no one has looked at mine more carefully than he." One key difference between their pictorial concepts was that Matisse drew and painted from nature, while Picasso was much more inclined to work from imagination. The subjects painted most frequently by both artists were women and still lives, with Matisse more likely to place his figures in fully realized interiors. Gertrude Stein, who loved stirring things up, wrote, "the feeling between the Picassoites and the Matisse-ites became bitter." Although Matisse dryly noted that "our disputes were always friendly," it should be pointed out that Picasso and his friends threw suction-cupped darts at Matisse's 1906 Portrait of Marguerite (which Picasso had obtained in a trade for his own Pitcher, Bowl and Lemon, from 1907). While the rift between the two artists eventually healed, the one between their supporters remained. ACADEMIE MATISSE IN PARIS & SERGEI SHCHUKIN In 1909, with the Matisse family lived in a former convent on the Boulevard des Invalides, in Paris, where the artist conducted a painting school. His immense notoriety, which had been confirmed in 1905-06 by Joy of Life, a work which seemed to trash every possible norm of pictorial order and painterly finesse.His friends organized and financed the Académie Matisse in Paris, a private and non-commercial school in which Matisse instructed young artists. It operated from 1911 until 1917. Hans Purrmann and Sarah Stein were several of his most loyal students. Although it lasted for only three years (1908-11), and yet, during its brief existence the Académie Matisse became one of the principal crossroads of modern painting for a number of gifted European and American artists. Given the reputation Matisse had acquired as the"wild man" of modernist color, it must have come as a shock to some of his early students that the program of instruction he offered was remarkably conservative. As Jean Heiberg, the first Norwegian to enroll in the Académie, later wrote in a memoir: "The school had, at Matisse's suggestion, acquired a copy of two antique sculptures from the Louvre, Mars and an archaic sculpture, which he often used to demonstrate. Every now and then he got completely rid of the life model and we only drew from the plaster casts, and his critiques then were no less profitable." Among Matisse’s students was Olga Meerson, a Russian Jew who had studied with Wassily Kandinsky in Munich and, already possessed of an elegant style, sought to remake herself under Matisse’s tutelage. Amélie suspected the worst. Perhaps a combination of Amélie’s jealousy and Meerson’s neediness caused a Matisse to end the connection, with bad feeling all around. Meerson moved to Munich, where she married the musician Heinz Pringsheim, a brother-in-law of Thomas Mann. Never having fulfilled her promise as a painter, she committed suicide in Berlin, in 1929. One of Matisse's biographers, with access to much of the artist's correspondence, contends that the artist, after his marriage, rarely, if ever, had sex with models, despite his apparent feelings for many. Two Russian art collectors stood out at the beginning of the 20th century: the cloth merchant Sergei Shchukin (1854–1936) and the textile manufacturer Ivan Morozov (1871–1921). Both acquired modern French art, developed a sensibility for spotting new trends, and publicized them in Russia. In this period, Matisse had initiated his fecund association with the Russian textile magnate and visionary collector, Sergei Shchukin. The artist created one of his major works La Danse specially for Shchukin as part of a two painting commission. Inspired by a circular dance-- perhaps a sardana - performed by fishermen at Collioure, this painting embodies the clash between the sacred and reality. Human hands link together, but they form a divine spirit. Moreover, Matisse all but abandoned perspective The work ’s flatness emphasizes the idea, colors, and material, a notion that made Matisse a model for Modernists. The other painting commissioned was Music, 1909. Shchukin was considered by some almost as a co-producer of some of the artist’s greatest works and was strongly commuted to the French painter’s work. Concerning the violent attacks on his friend, the Russian wrote to the artist: “The public is against you, but the future is yours.” By 1914 Shchukin’s house in Moscow contained thirty-seven Matisses. “He always picked the best,” the artist said. During the political revolution Lenin expropriated Shchukin collection in person but allowed Shchukin to remain, in servants’ quarters, as caretaker and guide. He died in Paris, in 1936. The collection is now in the Hermitage and Pushkin Museums From about 1911 to 1915, Matisse struggled with the ideas of Cubism, an experiment he felt he was "not participating in" because it did not "speak to [his] deeply sensory nature." MOROCCO Like many avant-garde artists in Paris, Matisse was receptive to a broad range of influences. He is one of the first painters to take an interest in various forms of “primitive” art. His art was profoundly influenced by Easter art as well. Matisse first flirted with the idea of visiting Morocco after a trip to the Moorish part of Spain in the winter of 1910. This taste of the Moors incited a flame of hope that there would be greater inspiration to paint in Morocco. Furthermore, well aware of the exotic subjects in Morocco that had engendered a wealth of inspiration for the famous French painter Delacroix when he visited the country over eighty years before, Matisse felt Morocco would stimulate his painting genius in ways Europe could not. He strove for neither the picturesque nor the pornographic. In Morocco, Matisse seems to have had difficulties finding models who would pose for him, particularly women because of the law of the veil. Only Jewesses and prostitutes were exempt. Luckily, Matisse to have found the prostitute Zorah for the purpose although he did not paint her as a prostitute. Instead, in his first picture of her, Zorah en Jaune, sexual themes are most conspicuously absent from the canvas. As a prostitute used to exposing and flaunting her body, Zorah could have easily been painted nude or with less clothing to show herself off, but instead Matisse chooses to keep her clothed and posed with prudence. Unlike the primitive, nude Western women in the Fauve Joy of Life. Moroccan Zorah is clothed with respect and detail to her finer characteristics. He is developing his ability to paint with awareness of the non-sexual qualities of his subject, a movement away from Fauve women. Many of Matisse's Moroccan paintings are covered only in the thinnest washes of pigment, as if he wanted the texture of the unpainted canvas to show through so that it would add rawness to the browns and grays. Matisse's odalisques have been described as "elaborate fictions" in which the artist re-created the image of the Islamic harem using French models posed in his Nice apartment. The fabrics, screens, carpets, furnishings and costuming recalled the exoticism of the "Orient" and provided a theme for Matisse's preoccupation with the figure and elaborate patterns of exotic fabrics. Although Matisse's interest in textiles are evident in his compositions made during his 1906 trip to Morocco, it didn't begin as a typical European attraction to the exotic. It was already present to him as a descendent of generations of weavers, who was raised among weavers in Bohain-en-Vermandois, which in the 1880's and 90's was a center of production of fancy silks for the Parisian fashion houses. Like virtually all his northern compatriots, he had an inborn appreciation of their texture and design. He understood the properties of weight and hang, he knew how to use pins and paper patterns, and he was supremely confident with scissors. Matisse was known to be an avid collector of fabrics, from his days as a poor art student in Paris to the latter years of his life, when his Nice studio overflowed with Persian carpets, delicate Arab embroideries, richly hued African wall hangings, and any number of colorful cushions, curtains, costumes, patterned screens, and backcloths. Textiles soon became the springboard for his radical experiments with perspective and an art based on decorative patterning and pure harmonies of color and line. When he moved house, he also moved his fabrics, describing them as "my working library." He added to the collection all his life, from markets in Algeria, Morocco and Tahiti to the end-of-season sales of Parisian haute couture. The revitalizing spirit of Morocco would live on in the artist's imagination until the cutouts of the artist's last years. AFTER PARIS Matisse continued to evolve in unexpected directions even though never became an abstract painter (though some of his most adventurous works, such as the View of Notre Dame of 1914 or the Yellow Curtain of 1916 come close). His motifs were always recognizable, and the tension between the subject and the formal aspects of the painting was a central concept of his artistic ideal. Matisse moved to Nice in 1917 to distance himself from wartime activity, where bright, warm colors showed him "simpler venues which won’t stifle the spirit." His spirit became loyal to the "silver clarity of light" in Nice, and he returned to Paris only for a few months each summer. The years 1917–30 are known as his early Nice period, when his principal subject remained the female figure or an odalisque dressed in oriental costume or in various stages of undress, depicted as standing, seated, or reclining in a luxurious, exotic interior of Matisse's own creation. These paintings are infused with southern light, bright colors, and a profusion of decorative patterns. They emanate the atmosphere suggestive of a harem. In 1929, Matisse temporarily suspended easel painting and traveled to America to sit on the jury of the 29th Carnegie International and, in 1930, spent some time in Tahiti and New York as well as Baltimore, Maryland and Merion, Pennsylvania.He was especially thrilled with New York. An important collector of modern art, and owner of the largest Matisse holdings in America, Dr. Albert Barnes of Merion, commissioned the artist to paint a large mural for the two-story picture gallery of his mansion. Matisse chose the subject of the dance, a theme that had preoccupied him since his early Fauve masterpiece Joy of Life. Americans were prominent among Matisse's patrons throughout his career, beginning with the Steins (Leo Stein bought Joy of Life right out of the Salon in 1906) and including the Cone sisters of Baltimore and the notoriously cantankerous Barnes. The foundational Matisse monograph was written during his lifetime by another American, Alfred Barr. Also important in promoting Matisse's presence before the transatlantic public was the Manhattan gallery founded in 1931 by the artist's son, Pierre, who remained a prominent figure in the New York art world for almost six decades. In addition to his father, he represented Balthus, Calder, Dubuffet, Giacometti, Miro, Tanguy and others, many of them also friends. Throughout his long and productive career, Matisse periodically refreshed his creative energies by turning from painting to drawing, sculpture and other forms of artistic expression. In his lifetime he also produced 12 illustrated books which were known as “livre d’artiste” (artist’s book), a specific type of illustrated book that became common in France around the turn of the century. These books were deluxe, limited editions, meant to be collected and admired as works of art, as well as, read. This process began when Swiss publisher Albert Skira first approached the modern master in 1930 to illustrate the work, Poesies, by 19th century French symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé . Matisse responded to Skira’s invitation with great enthusiasm and that summer, devoted most of his attention to the commission while he was residing in Paris. The result was a collection of 29 beautiful etchings, of which the Museum will display 16. The subject matter, like the poems themselves, varies considerably, although many of the images reflect the artist’s vacation to the South Pacific. Matisse’s etchings of Mallarmé’s poems are considered among his greatest works in the print medium. In 1941, again for Skira, Matisse began one of his most complicated and successful printmaking projects, Florilege des Amours de Ronsard, illustrating the love poems of 16th century French Renaissance poet Pierre de Ronsard. Ronsard’s subject and strong imagery lent themselves gracefully to Matisse’s favored themes of fruits, flowers, the female form and portraits. The artist selected the poems himself and translated the work from Renaissance French to contemporary French for the publication of the anthology DIVORCE & LATE FAMILY RELATIONSHIPS For all his long-lasting friendships with other artists, famous and obscure, Matisse's days and nights were absorbed by solitary labor. Playing the violin seemed a more intimate consolation for decades of critical abuse than the affections of his wife and children. Although their marriage was still somewhat fragile, the Matisses had decided to stay on in Nice when their lease expired at Place Charles-Félix in the summer of 1938. Matisse and his wife were separated in 1939 after 41 years when Amélie tried to dismiss the coolly efficient young Lydia Delectorskaya, an orphan refugee from Siberia, who had been hired as Amélie’s companion. However, the Matisses’ marriage ran afoul not of any romantic rival but for the artist’s wish to stand on his own. The first climax came years before in 1913, when Amélie sat more than a hundred times for the Portrait of Madame Matisse. A friend’s diary reported at the time. “Crazy! weeping! By night he recites the Lord’s Prayer! By day he quarrels with his wife!” The portrait, which was the last work to enter Shchukin’s collection, caused Matisse “palpitations, high blood pressure and a constant drumming in his ears.” Such frenzy was not rare when Matisse had difficulty with a painting. He referred to the painting years later in a letter to her as “the one that made you cry, but in which you look so pretty.” Amélie ceded routine leadership of the family to Marguerite. The 1913 portrait was his last painting of her. Matisse and his wife met the last time to discuss details of their legal separation, in July 1939. One of its key provisions was that everything would be divided equally between the couple. The meeting took place in Paris at the Gare St. Lazare and lasted thirty minutes, during which Amélie Matisse kept up a flow of small talk while her husband."My wife never looked at me, but I didn't take my eyes off her...," Matisse wrote on the night of that final encounter: "I couldn't get a word out.... I remained as if carved out of wood, swearing never to be caught that way again." "I'm going to try to isolate myself as if I were still absent,'' Matisse announced on his first return to Paris since the official separation from his wife, 'rarely leaving his apartment except for visits to the cinema (his first color film, starring Danny Kaye...
Category

1930s Modern Portrait Prints

Materials

Linocut

Portrait - Etching by Walter Piacesi - 1973
Located in Roma, IT
Portrait is an etching realized by the Italian artist Walter Piacesi in 1973 This etching represents a portrait through confident strokes. Hand-signed Numbered. Edition, III/XX ...
Category

1970s Contemporary Portrait Prints

Materials

Etching

Original "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" vintage 1949 movie poster
Located in Spokane, WA
Rare Authentic original "Take me out to the ball game' vintage movie poster. NSS: 49/119. Linen backed. Frank Sinatra, Ester Williams, Gene Kelly. M.G.M's Gay Technicolor Musical! TAKE ME OUT TO THE BALL GAME Cast overview, first billed only: Frank Sinatra .... Dennis Ryan Esther Williams .... K.C. Higgins Gene Kelly .... Eddie O'Brien Betty Garrett .... Shirley Delwyn Edward Arnold .... Joe Lorgan Jules Munshin .... Nat Goldberg Richard Lane...
Category

1940s American Realist Portrait Prints

Materials

Offset

Orit Fuchs: Vivid 101B - Giclee print on canvas female figure painting. 14.5/20”
Located in Tel Aviv, IL
Orit Fuchs lives and works in Tel Aviv‭, ‬a storyteller with a deep‭, ‬pure, and unquenchable appetite for artistic self-expression‭. ‬Her medium spans the gamut‭ - ‬sculptures‭, ‬pa...
Category

2010s Pop Art Portrait Prints

Materials

Giclée

Self-Portrait - Offset and Lithograph after Willem De Kooning - 1985
Located in Roma, IT
Self-portrait with Imaginary Brother is an offset and lithograph print after Willem De Kooning in 1938. The print suite was realized in 1985 in a limited edition of 2500, and curate...
Category

1980s Abstract Expressionist Portrait Prints

Materials

Offset, Lithograph

Miss Taylor
Located in Fairlawn, OH
Miss Taylor Drypoint, c. 1900 Signed in pencil lower left (see photo) Small edition, about 10 Very rich impression, full of burr Condition: Excellent Image size: 21-1/4 x 13-1/4" Sheet size: 25 3/8 x 18 5/8" Reference: Montesquiou XII Paul César Helleu was born in Vannes, Brittany, France. His father, who was a customs inspector, died when Helleu was in his teens. Despite opposition from his mother, he then went to Paris and studied at Lycée Chaptal. In 1876, at age 16, he was admitted to the École des Beaux-Arts, beginning academic training in art with Jean-Léon Gérôme. Helleu attended the Second Impressionist Exhibition in the same year, and made his first acquaintances with John Singer Sargent, James McNeill Whistler, and Claude Monet. He was struck by their modern, bold alla prima technique and outdoor scenes, so far removed from the studio. Following graduation, Helleu took a job with the firm Théodore Deck Ceramique Française hand-painting fine decorative plates. At this same time, he met Giovanni Boldini, a portrait painter with a facile, bravura style, who became a mentor and comrade, and strongly influenced his future artistic style. When he was 18 years old, Helleu established a close friendship with John Singer Sargent, four years his senior, that was to last his lifetime. Already becoming established, Sargent was receiving commissions for his work. Helleu had not sold anything, and was deeply discouraged almost to the point of abandoning his studies. When Sargent heard this, he went to Helleu and picked one of his paintings, praising his technique. Flattered that Sargent would praise his work, he offered to give it to him. Sargent replied, "I shall gladly accept this, Helleu, but not as a gift. I sell my own pictures, and I know what they cost me by the time they are out of my hand. I should never enjoy this pastel if I hadn't paid you a fair and honest price for it." With this he paid him a thousand-franc note. Helleu was commissioned in 1884 to paint a portrait of a young woman named Alice Guérin (1870–1933). They fell in love, and married on 28 July 1886. Throughout their lives together, she was his favourite model. Charming, refined and graceful, she helped introduce them to the aristocratic circles of Paris, where they became popular fixtures. On a trip to London with Jacques-Émile Blanche in 1885, Helleu met Whistler again and visited other prominent artists. His introduction to James Jacques Tissot, an accomplished society painter from France who made his career in England, proved a revelation. In Tissot, Helleu saw, for the first time, the possibilities of drypoint etching with a diamond point stylus directly on a copper plate. Helleu quickly became a virtuoso of the technique, drawing with the same dynamic and sophisticated freedom with his stylus as with his pastels. His prints were very well received, and they had the added advantage that a sitter could have several proofs printed to give to relations or friends. Over the course of his career, Helleu produced more than 2,000 drypoint prints. Soon, Helleu was displaying works to much acclaim at several galleries. Degas encouraged him to submit paintings to the Eighth Impressionist Exhibition in May and June 1886. The show was installed in a Paris apartment at 1 rue Laffitte, which ran concurrently with the official Salon that year to make a statement. Although 17 artists joined the famous exhibit that included the first Neo-Impressionistic works, Helleu, like Monet, refused to participate. Paul Helleu Sketching with His Wife (1889), by John Singer Sargent, The Brooklyn Museum, New York In 1886, Helleu befriended Robert de Montesquiou, the poet and aesthete, who bought six of his drypoints to add to his large print collection. Montesquiou later wrote a book about Helleu that was published in 1913 with reproductions of 100 of his prints and drawings. This volume remains the definitive biography of Helleu. Montesquiou introduced Helleu to Parisian literary salons, where he met Marcel Proust, who also became a friend. Proust created a literary picture of Helleu in his novel Remembrance of Things Past as the painter Elstir. (Later, Helleu engraved a well-known portrait of Proust on his deathbed.) Montesquiou's cousin, the Countess Greffulhe, enabled Helleu to expand his career as a portrait artist to elegant women in the highest ranks of Paris society, portraits that provide the basis for his modern reputation. His subjects included the Duchess of Marlborough, the Marchesa Casati...
Category

Early 1900s Art Nouveau Portrait Prints

Materials

Drypoint

Orit Fuchs: Vivid 101B - Giclee print on canvas female figure painting. 21.5/32”
Located in Tel Aviv, IL
Orit Fuchs lives and works in Tel Aviv‭, ‬a storyteller with a deep‭, ‬pure, and unquenchable appetite for artistic self-expression‭. ‬Her medium spans the gamut‭ - ‬sculptures‭, ‬pa...
Category

2010s Pop Art Portrait Prints

Materials

Giclée

Fillette
Located in London, GB
Lithograph on vellum paper, Edition of 25 Paper size: 33 x 26.5 cms (13 x 10 1/2 ins) Image size: 31.5 x 21.2 cms (12 3/8 x 8 3/8 ins)
Category

1940s Impressionist Portrait Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Peasant - Lithograph by Enrico Tommasi - Late-19th Century
Located in Roma, IT
Peasant is a lithograph realized by Enrico Tommasi in the Late 19th Century. Good conditions. Signed on Plate. The artwork is depicted through soft strokes in a well balanced comp...
Category

Late 19th Century Modern Portrait Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Portrait from Derriere Le Miroir - Lithograph after Alberto Giacometti - 1964
Located in Roma, IT
Portrait from Derriere Le Miroir is a lithograph realized after a drawing by Alberto Giacometti, in 1964. The work was published by the Art Magazine Derriere Le Miroir, in a numbe...
Category

1960s Contemporary Portrait Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Woman - Lithograph by Jean Benner - Late-19th Century
Located in Roma, IT
Woman is a lithograph realized in the Late 19th Century by Jean Benner (Mulhouse, 28 marzo 1836 – Parigi, 28 ottobre 1906). Good conditions. Signed on Plate. The artwork is depict...
Category

Late 19th Century Modern Portrait Prints

Materials

Lithograph

Richard Yarde "The White Orchid" limited edition giclée on fine art paper -loose
Located in Boca Raton, FL
Beautiful limited edition giclée print on fine art paper of a watercolor portrait of Billie Holiday by African-American artist Richard Yarde. Hand-number...
Category

Early 2000s Contemporary Portrait Prints

Materials

Paper, Giclée

Horse - Etching by Enotrio Pugliese - 1970s
Located in Roma, IT
Horse is a drypoint and etching, realized by Enotrio Pugliese in the 1970s. Limited edition of 2/8 prints, numbered and Hand-signed by the artist on the lower. Good conditions. En...
Category

1970s Contemporary Portrait Prints

Materials

Etching

Landscape - Etching and Aquatint by Enotrio Pugliese - 1967
Located in Roma, IT
Landscape is an Etching and Aquatint realized by Enotrio Pugliese in 1967. Hand-signed by the artist on the lower. Numbered, Limited edition of 30 prints. Good conditions. Enotri...
Category

1960s Contemporary Portrait Prints

Materials

Etching

Owl - Etching by Enotrio Pugliese - 1970s
Located in Roma, IT
Owl is an Etching and Aquatint realized by Enotrio Pugliese in the 1970s. Hand-signed by the artist on the lower. Numbered, Limited edition of 16 copies numbered. Good conditions....
Category

1970s Contemporary Portrait Prints

Materials

Etching

Country Study - Etching by Enotrio Pugliese - 1963
Located in Roma, IT
Country Study is an Etching realized by Enotrio Pugliese in 1968. Limited edition of 30 copies numbered and signed by the artist. Good condition on a white cardboard. Enotrio Pugl...
Category

1960s Contemporary Portrait Prints

Materials

Etching

America's Daughter
Located in Fairlawn, OH
America's Daughter Lithograph, 2016 Signed in pencil lower right Edition: Edition: 40 (15/40) From: America's Family (Five Images) Published by: Valley House Gallery and Sculpture Garden, Dallas, Texas and Thomas French Fine Art, LLC, Fairlawn, Ohio. Printed on Arches paper by James Reed...
Category

2010s Contemporary Portrait Prints

Materials

Lithograph

U. S. Census Saturday Evening Post original 1940 vintage poster
Located in Spokane, WA
Original poster: THE SAURDAY EVENING POST. Artist: Noman Rockwell. Size: 21.75" x 28". Archival linen backed in very fine condition. The painting for this original poster ...
Category

1940s American Realist Portrait Prints

Materials

Offset

Mythological Scene - Etching by Domenico Klemi Bonatti - 1850
Located in Roma, IT
Mythological Scene is an etching realized by Domenico Klemi Bonatti in 1850. Good condition. Stamp signed on plate. Domenico Klemi Bonatti (Venice 1794 ) he worked in Milan betwee...
Category

1850s Modern Portrait Prints

Materials

Etching

Recently Viewed

View All