Lower right stamped with initials.
Henri Matisse was one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century, whose stylistic innovations of Picasso, affected the art of generations of younger painters and still do today. His subjects comprised landscape, still life, portraiture, interiors, but he particularly focused on the female figure. One medium that Matisse explored and experimented with throughout his lifetime was drawing. Being the most direct expression of the artist's thoughts, drawing helped him to work out compositional and stylistic problems or new ideas. In the early 1940s he conceived his famous Thèmes et Variations, sensitively drawn spare works in elegant, unshaded line, describing simplified forms of female figures, heads or still lifes. As he himself said: "A colourist makes his presence known even in a single charcoal drawing."
