Notre-Dame dissolves into planes of blue, green and black

A window with pale glazed panes sits at upper left within an otherwise near-abstract view built almost entirely from blues, from powder to slate. Beside the window, a rounded mass of yellow-green casts a dark shadow. Below, a few thin diagonal black lines cross bands of blue, breaking the canvas into loose geometric zones. The paint is thinly brushed, letting the ground show through in places. A signature and date appear at lower left.

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.