Drawing Detail
Window on TahitiArtist: Henri Matisse
Medium: Drawings, Lead pencil, 53x40.8 cm
Date: 1936
Genre: Genre Painting
Source: Gift of Lydia Delectorskaya, 1968
Matisse visited Tahiti in 1930, and over the next five or so years he returned repeatedly to the theme, transferring his direct impressions of nature to drawings, etchings and two oil panels, Tahiti I and Tahiti II. The Hermitage drawing came before the composition Tahiti II. The window looking out onto a large world, the yacht with its energetic lines and jolly vertical mast, ring out like an invitation to a journey. But the window does not draw our gaze into the depths of the paper, and the island does not melt in the romantic distance, since all the elements in the composition are flat and generalized in the extreme. Captured in a single rhythm are the curtain of the window, the treetops and the clouds over Tahiti; the horizontals of the balustrade and the island seem to echo each other, as do the verticals of the mast and the borders of the drawing.