Notre-Dame, une fin d'après-midi (A Glimpse of Notre Dame in the Late Afternoon)

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Henri Matisse

French, 1869-1954

Notre-Dame, une fin d'après-midi (A Glimpse of Notre Dame in the Late Afternoon), 1902

oil on paper mounted on canvas

support: 28 1/2 x 21 1/2 inches (72.39 x 54.61 cm); framed: 37 x 30 1/4 x 4 inches (93.98 x 76.835 x 10.16 cm)

Collection Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York

Gift of Seymour H. Knox, Jr., 1927

1927:24

More Details

Inscriptions

signature, dated / lower left / Henri Matisse 1902

Provenance

Reinhardt Galleries, New York, until 1927;
purchased by A. Conger Goodyear [1877-1964], New York, 1927;
sold by Goodyear to the Albright Art Gallery, March 20, 1927

Class

Paintings (visual works)

Work Type

Oil painting (visual work)

This information may change due to ongoing research. Glossary of Terms

A Glimpse of Notre Dame in the Late Afternoon depicts a view from a window in the apartment and studio where Henri Matisse lived and worked from 1899 until 1907. Matisse returned to this motif many times throughout his career, painting it from the same vantage point but in varying stylistic modes. In this work, he rendered all the compositional elements in the same loose brushwork and color scheme. Here, he unifies a bridge over the River Seine, the east façade of Notre Dame Cathedral, an interior wall, and the edge of the open window shutter. The application of color in block-like strokes and the absence of detail or surface texture in this work resemble that found in the later canvases of Paul Cézanne, like Morning in Provence, ca. 1900–6, also in the Albright-Knox’s collection. Matisse executed his earlier paintings of this subject in a more Impressionist style, using a representational palette. Throughout this composition, however, he marshaled somber shades of blue, pink, green, and purple. In 1905, this unconventional use of color and bold brushwork, shared by Matisse and his contemporaries André Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck, led to the development of Fauvism.