Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art

About this Work

Perhaps inspired by Henri Matisse’s trips to Morocco in 1912 and 1913, this reclining female nude was actually based on a model in his studio. Although related to his lithographic nudes from the 1920s, it is unusual in its technique. Matisse made few copperplate prints between 1915 and 1929.

This etching of an elongated, half-clothed woman with its economy of line, lack of hatching, and extension of the figure beyond the picture plane foreshadows the nymphs in Matisse’s illustrations for Mallarmé’s Poesies. The artist also repeated the subject of the reclining odalisque with a magnolia plant in several lithographs from the same period.

This print was designed for a book project on the nude with Ambroise Vollard, which never materialized. The image is only known to exist in proof editions—two of which are in the Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art’s collection (72.75.5 and 98.392).