In this second version of The Young Sailor, painted in Collioure or Paris, contours are sharpened, forms are more defined, and colors have been reduced to large, mostly flat areas of bright green, blue, and pink—a decorative style and palette that Matisse adopted from this point onward. He also drastically changed the expression and mood of the sailor. His stylizing brush wiped away the earlier round-cheeked youthfulness of the face, replacing it with a masklike expression of savy cunning. The Young Sailor II has become an icon of Fauve portraiture. Recent research has established that the sitter was an eighteen-year-old fisherman named Germain Augustin Barthélémy Montargès (1888–1938).

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