A falling white figure bursts with yellow stars on midnight blue

A white silhouette figure with arms flung wide and legs trailing falls through a black diagonal band flanked by cobalt blue. A red heart-shaped mark sits at the centre of its chest. Scattered yellow, spiked stars burst across the blue ground on either side. Signed 'Henri Matisse' at lower right. Designed in 1943 for the cover of the review Verve, four years before the Jazz version of Icarus.

Henri Matisse (1869–1954) was a French painter, draughtsman, printmaker and sculptor, and with Picasso one of the two artists who defined modern painting in the first half of the twentieth century. He came to prominence in 1905 as the leader of the Fauves, whose canvases of that summer at Collioure used unmixed colour as the structure of the picture rather than its decoration. From 1917 he worked mainly in Nice, painting interiors, windows and models in patterned rooms with a lighter touch, and from the 1940s, confined largely to bed after surgery, he invented the papiers découpés — compositions cut from gouache-painted paper, published in the book Jazz (1947) and culminating in the Blue Nudes and the large wall-scale cut-outs of his last years. His work is held by the Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Hermitage and the Barnes Foundation among many others.

Printed as a museum-grade giclée on Hahnemühle fine art paper using 12-ink archival pigment printing. Available handframed in FSC-certified wood with optional float glass, or unframed. Ships worldwide with free delivery to 30+ countries.