Paysage marocain (Acanthes)

Matisse painted this canvas in 1912, after spending the winter of 1911 and 1912 in Morocco, a journey that marked his move beyond the Fauvist phase. In his own account, those stays brought him closer to nature in a way that the vigorous but restrictive theory Fauvism had become no longer allowed. Before setting out he had seen a major exhibition of Islamic art in Munich, and he knew the Moroccan scenes painted by Eugène Delacroix and Pierre Loti's travel writing on Morocco. The landscape he found closely matched the one he had imagined from those sources.

He spent six weeks in the large garden of the Villa Bronx in Tangier. After weeks of heavy rain, the sun brought the light he had been waiting for, and the picture shows a blue ground laid over pink, covered with flowering acanthus leaves. Matisse was not aiming for a literal view of the place. He wanted to draw out the expressive power of colour itself: the sense of dripping damp, the vigour of growing plants and an inner force running through the whole surface.

The painting belongs to a group of three canvases of identical size that can be read as a triptych, all begun at the Villa Bronx. The other two are Moroccan Garden (Periwinkles), in a private collection, and Palm Leaf, Tangier, held by the National Gallery of Art. The format recalls Western religious art, such as altarpieces. Marcel Sembat, a French politician and collector of Matisse, wrote in his monograph on the artist that these three garden paintings amount to a kind of transfiguration close to religious feeling. The canvas now hangs in the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, where it has been since 1917.

Painter

Henri Matisse

Date

1912

Medium

oil paint, canvas

Dimensions

115 × 80 cm

Museum

Moderna Museet, Stockholm Municipality

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