1905, Henri Matisse, Landscape at Collioure -- Museum of Modern Art (New York)
From the museum label (at the Metropolitan Museum of Art special exhibition): These three works (two in oil and one in watercolor) were made as studies for The Joy of Life, Matisse's final bow to Neo-Impressionism. They capture a quiet grove in the woodland above Collioure. Crafted almost entirely in separate brushstrokes, the first sketch conforms to the rigorous, compartmentalized divisionist techniques of Neo-Impressionism. The Copenhagen painting is denser and far more volumetric, yet it shares the same spatial recession and configuration of trees, some with undulating trunks. Color is freely applied often without reference to nature, whereas the watercolor has a much lighter touch. The white of the unpainted paper casts light throughout the sheet in an image far more lustrous than shown in the oils. At summer's end, Matisse took his Collioure studies to Paris, where they were foundational to the development of his most ambitious painting at the time, The Joy of Life.
Link to other pictures from the exhibition Vertigo of Color.
1905, Henri Matisse, Landscape at Collioure -- Museum of Modern Art (New York)
From the museum label (at the Metropolitan Museum of Art special exhibition): These three works (two in oil and one in watercolor) were made as studies for The Joy of Life, Matisse's final bow to Neo-Impressionism. They capture a quiet grove in the woodland above Collioure. Crafted almost entirely in separate brushstrokes, the first sketch conforms to the rigorous, compartmentalized divisionist techniques of Neo-Impressionism. The Copenhagen painting is denser and far more volumetric, yet it shares the same spatial recession and configuration of trees, some with undulating trunks. Color is freely applied often without reference to nature, whereas the watercolor has a much lighter touch. The white of the unpainted paper casts light throughout the sheet in an image far more lustrous than shown in the oils. At summer's end, Matisse took his Collioure studies to Paris, where they were foundational to the development of his most ambitious painting at the time, The Joy of Life.
Link to other pictures from the exhibition Vertigo of Color.