When the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris mounted the exhibition “Matisse and Marguerite: Through Her Father’s Eyes,” the world took note, with feature articles in the Guardian and the Wall Street Journal recounting the life of his eldest daughter, conceived in an affair with one of his models, Caroline Jaoblau.
When the show closed over the summer, Barbara Dauphin Duthuit, the wife of Henri Matisse’s grandson, opted to give the museum the 61 works she had lent to the show, including seven paintings along with numerous drawings, etchings, lithographs, and illustrated books. Most feature portraits of the artist’s eldest daughter (1894–1982), who sat for him regularly, and many had been on view in France for the first time.
The works span the first half of the twentieth century, ranging from Marguerite as a child through Marguerite endormie (1920), which shows her convalescing in Étretat from chronic pain in her larynx after a childhood case of diphtheria, to portraits created in 1945, just after she narrowly escaped deportation for her involvement in the French Resistance after being tortured by the Gestapo. A number of prints and illustrated books, which the artist dedicated to her, recall her close work with the artist’s printers. Another drawing shows Claude Duthuit, the donor’s husband and the only son of Marguerite and her husband, the art critic Georges Duthuit.
“This extraordinarily generous gesture testifies to a deep commitment on the part of Madame Duthuit, and to her confidence in the museum, which effectively becomes Marguerite’s new home for the decades and centuries to come,” says museum director Fabrice Hergott in press materials.
Henri Matisse, lithographed flyer for the exhibition “Nice, Travail et Joie,” 1949, dedicated to his daughter Marguerite.
Jean-Louis Losi
The new gift greatly expands the museum’s Matisse holdings, which previously numbered twenty works, including two monumental versions of his famed La Danse (1930–1933), which are on permanent view in a dedicated gallery.
This is Barbara Dutuit’s latest gift of Matisse works to French public collections. In 2013 she gave the 1910 painting Marguerite au chat noir (Marguerite with a Black Cat) to Paris’s Centre Pompidou, and in October, she gave the 1907 painting Nature morte à la statuette africaine (Still Life with African Statuette), from the artist’s collection, to the Matisse museum in Nice.
