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Nature morte avec des fruits signed 'Henri. Matisse' (upper right) oil on canvas 231/4 x 283/4in. (59 x 73.1cm.) Painted in 1898 PROVENANCE Gustave Fayet, Paris. Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Paris (15952), by whom purchased from the above on 13 April 1907. Walter Epstein, on 23 May 1910 (1,100 Fr.). Julius Meier-Graefe, Berlin. Anon. sale, Parke-Bernet New York, 17 January 1945, lot 7, where purchased by the family of the present owner. LITERATURE G-P. & M. Dauberville, Matisse, vol. I, Paris, 1995, no. 23, p. 316 (illustrated p. 317) EXHIBITION Paris, Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Henri Matisse, February-March 1910, no. 6. NOTES In 1897, the year before Nature morte avec des fruits ('Still Life With Fruits') was executed, Henri Matisse had exhibited his first Impressionist work, La desserte ('The Dinner Table'). Attacked by many academicians and critics, Matisse found a staunch and loyal defender in his teacher Gustave Moreau. Although Moreau was no avant-garde artist, he was also no academician: he encouraged his pupils to develop as they intended. He was a guiding hand, assisting, not prescribing. Matisse had only really begun to paint seven years earlier when his mother had given him some paints during his long convalescence from appendicitis, but already he had developed into an original artistic mind, daring and skilled. Nature morte avec des fruits shares some of the Impressionist virtuosity of La desserte. Moreau had especially praised the latter's painting, for Matisse's skilled rendering of the glass-ware. The same mastery is evident in Nature morte avec des fruits. Matisse has not merely represented the likeness of the objects on the table, but rather depicts the light and air of the room - he has captured the ambience. This is a living still life, and the spectator is encouraged to interact, as the artist did, with the food and drink on the table. Already in 1898, the gradual developement of Matisse's work and his first steps towards what would become his Fauve style are evident in some of the wide, heavy brushstrokes and palette of this expressive painting. He has used contrasting dark outlines to delineate even light objects. Forms are being divided, reduced and lent vivid colours, making this still life far from still. Matisse is already forming the artistic idiom that would become the key to his oeuvre.