Brimming with resplendent, invigorating color, Jeune fille à la robe rose is an exuberant ode to the vitality that defined the final years of Henri Matisse’s artistic output. Executed in September 1942, the present work marks the genesis of a renewed painting practice in which the artist, “[played] with light, multiplying and dividing it, making it glimmer and glow in compositions that reduced the minimal ingredients available—a door, a window, striped fabric, slatted blinds, somet.mes s a couture dress from his cupboard—to strips, swathes and swatches, broad bands and tilted planes of pure color” (Hilary Spurling, Matisse the Master, A Life of Henri Matisse: The Conquest of Colour, 1909-1954, New York, 2005, p. 411).

Miraculously recovering from severe health issues and a surgical operation in 1941, Matisse seized what he considered a second chance at life: the artist recalled, “What I did before this illness, before this operation, always has the feeling of too much effort…before this, I always lived with my belt tightened. What I created afterwards represents me myself: free and detached” (quoted in Exh. Cat., St. Louis Art Museum, Henri Matisse: the Paper Cut-Outs, 1977, p. 43). Reinvigorated with creative momentum, the artist spent his long convalescence in the grand rooms of his home and studio at the Hôtel Régina, Nice executing numerous drawings that express a novel spontaneity.

During this t.mes , Matisse sensed a newfound determination to reconcile the stylistic disparity between his paintings and drawings, which for years he viewed as inhibiting his ability to achieve full painterly expression. In early 1942 the artist wrote, “For the last year I have made an enormous effort in drawing…what I’ve produced has been like a floraison after fifty years of efforts. I need to do the same in painting” (quoted in Pierrre Schneider, Matisse, London, 2002, p. 648). Executed during one of his first painting campaigns following his medical procedure, Jeune fille à la robe rose fully deploys the vivacious freedom of his drawings, proclaiming a radical transformation in Matisse’s painting practice.

The present work is among a series of five paintings feverishly completed within the span of one month (see figs. 1-4), all of which depict a woman seated in an armchair before the balcony windows that occupy the southern wall of his studio at the Hôtel Régina. Each successive painting presents shutters in progressive stages of closure, culminating in the present work, in which they are fully closed. Eschewing any extraneous detail or reference to the outside world, Matisse refines the composition to its essence of form and hue. The artist’s studio interior is compressed to its most extreme, its walls and floor reduced to a continuous plane of riotous pigment. Describings Jeune fille à la robe rose, Patrice Deparpe details, “In making natural light disappear, Matisse requires that the painting generate its own light; through the juxtaposition of colors, he illuminates it ‘from the inside’” (Exh. Cat., Paris, Musée national d'art moderne, Matisse: Paires et séries, 2012, p. 228, translated from the French). Wielding the full expressive possibilities of color, Matisse invokes the audacious palettes of his revolutionary Fauve canvases such as Le Bonheur de vivre (see fig. 5)

The present work asserts a rhythmic verticality: each band of vermillion, yellow ochre and green seamlessly extends into the decor and figure below. The rigid, frontal posture of the titular girl, balanced tenuously on the edge of the armchair, heightens this effect. Matisse erases any identifying features of his sitter, Simone “Monette” Vincent, whose emphatic contours and unvarying rosy form anticipate the distilled figuration of Matisse’s cut-outs, such as Nu Bleu II, that predominate the artist’s oeuvre beginning the following year (see fig. 6).

Discussing this period of his production, the artist declared, “It may seem that joy radiates from my work more than in the past, but this is exactly what I tried to do fifty years ago. It had taken me all this t.mes to reach a stage where I can say what I want to say” (quoted in Shirley Nielsen Blum, Henri Matisse: Rooms with a View, London, 2010, p. 148). Executed amidst the destruction and fast-encroaching invasions in his homeland from both Germany and Italy, the present work underscores Matisse’s determination to create in light of both personal and global adversity. Jeune fille à la robe rose is among the final works executed as part of his twenty-five year Nice period. As his lodgings at the Hôtel Régina came under threat of bombardment in the following months, Matisse brought the present work to his refuge at Villa Le Rêve on the outskirts of the Provençal town of Vence. In 1945, Matisse donated the present work to a charity auction held at Galerie Denise René in Paris to aid others displaced by the war. Jeune fille à la robe rose endures as an ebullient celebration of life and creative liberation.