Collioure in Color

The picturesque fishing village of Collioure sits on the French Mediterranean coast. Its charming architecture had drawn artists for decades, usually in the summer months.

Life in the village was quiet and calm, a welcome respite from the bustle of Paris. As early as 1887, the French painter Paul Signac had painted in Collioure, when it was accessible only by boat.

Postcard of the Collioure, France harbour in 1952. © PVDE / Bridgeman Images

In the summer of 1905, Henri Matisse arrived with his family in Collioure. Matisse invited his friend André Derain to join him, and together they embarked on a new adventure in painting and drawing, creating works such as Derain’s Fishing Boats, Collioure (1905), shown here.

For the local population, largely Catalan-speaking working-class fishermen, it must have been quite a surprise to see two French artists combing the beaches and hillside searching for imagery to paint.

Because it was difficult to engage local models—many local fishermen were unfamiliar with the idea of sitting for a portrait—the two artists turned to Amélie, Matisse’s wife, as their sitter.

Henri Matisse married Amélie in 1898. They had two sons, and Amélie adopted Marguerite, Matisse’s child from a previous liaison. Until their separation in the 1930s, Amélie was a selfless companion. She comforted Matisse when he felt anxious and posed for him on many occasions.

In Collioure, she modeled on the beaches and in the cork oak forests, sometimes in colorful clothing, sometimes surreptitiously in the nude. 

Henri Matisse (French, 1869–1954). Nude in a Wood (Nu dans la forêt; Nu assis dans le bois), 1906. Oil on board mounted on panel, 16 x 13 in. (41x 32 cm). Brooklyn Museum, New York, Gift of George F. Of (52.150). © 2024 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Matisse and Derain captured her striking presence across a range of media: in oil, watercolor, as well as pen and ink, such as in Matisse and His Wife at Collioure (1905), drawn by Derain.

Their freewheeling experiments on paper and canvas, which shocked the public with often riotous colors drawn from sensory perception, revolutionized French painting at the turn of the 20th century.

Amélie was central to those investigations. In Woman with an Umbrella at the Seashore (1905), Matisse softened his palette while using very deliberate brushstrokes in separate touches of watercolor.

Matisse worked in a very measured style, believing that separate touches of interwoven pigment resulted in vibrant, pulsating color in the eye of the beholder. These brushstrokes remind us that he was still attentive to Neo-Impressionism, an artistic movement characterized by a rigorous system of color interaction, which Signac had popularized in the late 19th century. 

But while Neo-Impressionist painting had as its goal the intermixing of precise colors to suggest light and shimmering surfaces, Matisse departed from those strict dictates, preferring the freedom to use color prompted by his own imagination and sensibility. 

Color, for Matisse, was an emotional response to the subject.

In this study of Amélie, Matisse appears to work very quickly, laying in a few strokes here and a few strokes there. On closer observation, one can see that he first sketched his image in pencil. He is testing color as it is meant to describe form and structure imagery.

In the summer of 1904, while staying with Signac in St. Tropez, Matisse bought a blue-and-white robe, a derivative of a kimono worn by French women amid the vogue for all things Japonaises in France at the time.

Amélie modeled the robe for Matisse and Derain. Whether in oil, watercolor, or pen and ink, the robe appears on Amélie in various settings—at the seashore, in an olive grove, and in the studio.

In La Japonaise: Woman beside the Water (1905), Matisse makes a dazzling statement of color and brushwork. Painted outdoors, Amélie is barely recognizable in a kaleidoscope of colors freely brushed.

The painting is not about crafting an image, teasing out a narrative, but rather about patterning brushwork. Hundreds of parallel strokes—all separated—test our capacity to read the picture.

Only the curls and squiggles of her robe give outline to her abstracted profile. Spatially and chromatically organized on the white ground layer of the canvas, the blocky, broken strokes activate the picture plane with an entrancing visual rhythm.

One of the finest paintings to emerge from the summer in Collioure is a portrait of Amélie Matisse by Derain. Matisse and Derain generally spent their days combing the beaches and inland foothills searching for imagery, but when the midday sun heated Collioure to an intolerable temperature, they retreated to the studio to paint. We imagine that Amélie posed for Woman with a Shawl, Madame Matisse in a Kimono (1905) in the studio.

Despite the title, do we call it a portrait? Perhaps it would be better described as a figure study with a known model. Derain focuses less on physiognomy, less on the individual, than on color and patterning.

Derain renders space ambiguously. He deliberately flattens the environment around Amélie. There is only the mere suggestion of a table and the chair she apparently occupies.

Amélie demurs in her expression, as if to signal that she is just a prop enabling Derain to paint magnificent color and audacious patterning.

Amélie, as subject, is entirely defined by her voluminous kimono—its broadly stroked folds of fabric and choreography of cobalt blue patterning. Dots and dashes, lines and curlicues, transform in color as the kimono reaches the red fan in her hand at center left.

There, green takes hold.

As with his other pictures painted in Collioure, Derain is fundamentally testing color relationships in this affecting portrait. He first lays in red and green as background.

Red and green are, of course, complementary; they sit opposite each other on a color wheel.

Derain introduces a few other colors.

Deep blue gives some indication of spatial differentiation.

Ochre and green suggest shadows hitting the kimono skirt.

Derain thought a lot about shadows in Mediterranean light. Referencing his observations, he wrote to his friend Vlaminck, “Why, it’s the light, a blond light, golden, which suppresses the shadows. It’s maddening work….”

What he was saying was that shadows carried light, and therefore color. In Amélie’s dress, shadowing appears in colors unrelated to the kimono design, strikingly in ochre and green.

Red and green animate the canvas in relational color and variegated brushwork. These polarities would come to be recognizable in the paintings of a generation of artists known as the Fauves (literally “wild beasts”). Bold, expressive colors that seemed to vibrate on the canvas were their trademark.

When Amélie posed for Derain, she must have been posing for Matisse as well, only Matisse chose to sketch her in pen and ink.

He made two drawings of Amélie sitting in a fringed armchair holding a fan and looking down toward the ground.

These graphic studies animate the kimono’s patterning with even more gusto—swirls and arabesques settle into the fabric in ink, whereas those shapes seem to lift off the kimono in the painted equivalent.

Henri Matisse (French, 1869–1954). Madame Matisse with Her Fan (Madame Matisse à l’éventail), 1906. Pen and black ink over graphite on cream wove paper, 19 × 12 in. (49 × 31 cm). The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Dorothy Braude Edinburg to the Harry B. and Bessie K. Braude Memorial Collection, 1998 (1998.709).  © 2024 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Matisse returned to Paris at the end of the summer with 15 paintings, 30 watercolors, and some 100 drawings. He saw this body of work as source material for his Paris practice. Over and above these tangible primers, the experience of Collioure would go a long way toward shaping his language in paint. The same was true for Derain.  

When Woman with a Hat (1905) was shown at the Salon d’Automne in 1905, a juried exhibition of hundreds of contemporary artists, it ignited a furor. No one had ever seen color run wild nor raw brushwork announce itself on canvas with such flagrant disregard for its descriptive mandate.

The painting of Amélie, made in Paris soon after Matisse returned to his studio, boldly articulates the freewheeling experiments of that fabled summer. The picture is full of surprises and conundrums. Paint in all its glory seems to nearly suffocate the sitter.

One can hardly imagine wearing that hat.

It takes a lot of looking to realize that she is holding a fan spread across her chest, masking the rounding folds of her body. Red, green, pink, and blue alternate in often crude brushwork. Green takes charge everywhere.

Amélie posed for Matisse in his Paris studio wearing all black, save for a red ribbon around her neck. The painting becomes even more of a mystery, even more daring, when one realizes that its explosion of color was not real but imagined.

Referring to his Collioure paintings as shown in the Salon d’Automne in Paris in 1905, Matisse said to his friend Signac some years later:

“It was the first time in my life that I was content to be exhibiting, for my things are perhaps not very important, but they have the merit of expressing in a very pure way my sensations. Something I have been working toward since I began to paint.”

The Collioure color experiments encouraged contemporary artists to look beyond the natural world in assembling their palettes.

Those who followed the example of Matisse and Derain were called Fauves. It was their daring new language that liberated artists to paint color from sensory experience. Fauvism was brief but vital to artists for decades to come as the strains of Modernism found new forms of expression.

Image Credits

André Derain (French, 1880–1954). Fishing Boats, Collioure, 1905. Oil on canvas, 32 × 39 in. (81 × 100 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Raymonde Paul, in memory of her brother, C. Michael Paul, and Purchase, Lila Acheson Wallace Gift, 1982 (1982.179.29) 

André Derain (French, 1880–1954). Matisse and His Wife at Collioure, 1905. Ink on paper, 12 × 19 in. (30× 48 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Hermina, Movses, Charles, and David Allen Devrishian Fund, 2004 (2004.60). 

Henri Matisse (French, 1869–1954). Woman with an Umbrella at the Seashore, 1905. Watercolor and charcoal on paper, 11 x 8 in. (27 x 21 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949 (49.70.6)

Henri Matisse (French, 1869–1954). La Japonaise: Woman beside the Water (La Japonaise au bord de l’eau), 1905. Oil and graphite on canvas, 14× 11 in. (35 × 28 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase and anonymous gift, 1983 (709.1983). © 2024 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

André Derain (French, 1869–1954). Woman with a Shawl, Madame Matisse in a Kimono (La femme au chale, Madame Matisse en kimono), 1905. Oil on canvas, 32 × 26 in. (80× 65 cm). Private Collection, Courtesy of Nevill Keating Pictures. © 2024 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

Henri Matisse (French, 1869–1954). Femme au chapeau (Woman with a Hat), 1905. Oil on canvas, 32 x 24 in. (81 x 60 cm). San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Bequest of Elise S. Haas. © 2024 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph by Ben Blackwell.