Henri Matisse: Les Velours, 1947 – Porcelain Art Mug

Henri Matisse completed Composition (Les velours) in 1947, the same year he published Jazz and at the height of his engagement with the cut-out technique he had been developing since the early 1940s. The work is an extended horizontal composition — some 239 centimetres wide — made from shapes cut from paper painted in gouache, mounted on painted paper ground. The forms Matisse arrived at are simultaneously organic and abstract: they suggest algae, antlers, plant fronds, and purely invented shapes in equal measure, expanding and contracting across the long format with the rhythmic freedom that the scissors-and-paper method permitted. There is no preparatory drawing, no correction: the cutting is the drawing.

Les velours entered the Kunstmuseum Basel in 1954, where it remains. Its scale makes it primarily a work for institutional experience, but the individual forms translate with surprising vitality to smaller formats — their internal logic, the relationship between figure and ground, the counterpoint of positive and negative shapes, survives the change of scale. Matisse at eighty was working at a size and with an ambition that younger artists might have envied.

Fine porcelain, 10 oz — 104 mm high, 75 mm across the base. The image runs around the body; handle and rim stay white. Dishwasher and microwave safe.

From the same series: La Gerbe, 1953 · Icarus, 1947 · Self-Portrait, 1930 · The Snail, 1953 · Blue Nude II, 1952 · Nuit de Noël, 1952 · La Danse, 1909 · La Danse (Barnes Mural), 1933

Henri Matisse, Composition (Les velours), 1947, gouache on paper cutout, mounted on painted paper. Kunstmuseum Basel. Public domain in Switzerland, the EU and the United Kingdom; Matisse died in 1954. This mug is not sold into the United States.

Selected by Dr. Walther Fuchs for the Tazzarte collection.