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Young Sailor II

1906
On view at The Met Fifth Avenue in Gallery 908
Beginning in 1905, Matisse spent the summers—and sometimes even the winters—in Collioure and continued to do so intermittently until about 1914. It was in Collioure that the sitter for The Young Sailor, a local sardine fisherman, caught his eye. In this second version of the painting (the first, dated 1906, is in a private collection), the contours have been sharpened, the forms are more defined, and the colors have been reduced to large, mostly flat areas of bright green, blue, and pink—a decorative style and palette adopted by Matisse from this point on. Matisse also drastically altered the sailor's mood and expression. His stylizing brush wiped off the earlier round-cheeked youthfulness of the fisherman's face, replacing it with a masklike expression of savvy cunning from which a touch of licentiousness seems not absent. The sitter's rather theatrical looks and his colorful costume, set against the pink candy-colored ground, combine to make this work one of Matisse's most decorative portraits in the Fauve manner.

Artwork Details

Object Information
  • Title: Young Sailor II
  • Artist: Henri Matisse (French, Le Cateau-Cambrésis 1869–1954 Nice)
  • Date: 1906
  • Medium: Oil on canvas
  • Dimensions: 39 7/8 × 32 11/16 in. (101.3 × 83 cm)
  • Classification: Paintings
  • Credit Line: Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection, 1998
  • Object Number: 1999.363.41
  • Curatorial Department: Modern and Contemporary Art

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Study for "Young Sailor", Henri Matisse French, Graphite on paper
Study for "Young Sailor"
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Landscape, Nice, Henri Matisse French, Oil on canvas board
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Ulysses, Henri Matisse French
Ulysses
Multiple artists/makers
1935
Gravures originales sur le thème de Pasiphaé Pour le texte de H. de Montherlant
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1981
Nono Lebasque, Henri Matisse French, Oil on canvas
Nono Lebasque
Henri Matisse
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