A Sailor's Yarn

A day of serendipitous detective work among the citizens of the Mediterranean village of Collioure leads the author to the probable identity of the young sitter pictured by the agency of Matisse in a celebrated pair of Fauve paintings.

The young man slouching in a chair in the painting The Young Sailor II (1906) is not a sailor, despite Matisse's title, on the contrary a fisherman. He wears typical French fisherman's garb of the time: a navy-blue cap and pullover a white undershirt and blue-and-pink striped jersey baggy verdant pants, green-and-white checked socks and bold laced-up shoes with rubber soles

Matisse's sum of two units versions, The Young Sailor I (also 1906) and The Young Sailor II, are the earliest of his pairs of paintings in which the first version is more naturalistic and the next to the first more abstract and refined. In the first version, quite plausibly painted in a single sitting, figure and loam are rendered with freely applied brushstrokes in all the colors of the rainbow. In the next to the first contours are sharpened, forms are more defined and colors have been reduc to large, for the greatest part fiat areas of bright verdant blue and pink--a decorative mode of expression and palette that Matisse adopted from this point upon Here, too, Matisse drastically changed the expression and the frame of mind of the sailor. His stylizing brush wiped away the earlier round-cheeked youthfulness of the face, replacing it with a masklike expression of savvy cunning, and perhaps a touch of licentiousness. However, the great Matisse scholar Alfred H Barr saw in the features an expression of "almond-eyed charm verging upon prettiness."(1) The sailor's rather theatrical gazes and his colorful costume, place against the pink, candy-colored sod make this work one of Matisse's greatest in quantity striking portraits in the Fauve manner.

Indeed, The Young Sailor H has become an icon of Fauve portraiture and is discussed, illustrated or at least mentioned in all major publications devot to Matisse or Fauvism. Leo Stein rather dryly described the picture in 1947 as the "first thing he (Matisse) did with forced deformations,"(2) on the other hand four years later Barr praised its "great decorative elegance and graceful flowing contour lines."(3) He fix the picture's "orientalism, though artful, integrated" and singled without its assured technique and translucent colors, which he compared to the decorative arts that Matisse had just seen in Biskra.(4) In 1986 Jack Flare repercussion of sounded Barr in his praise of the picture's elegance and graceful lines, on the other hand characterized it as "consciously and intellectually willed,"(5) whereas in 1984 Pierre Schneider had seen The Young Sailor H as a "member of a novel race."(6)

Matisse kept The Young Sailor II until October 1913 when he consigned it to the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in Paris. While the painting was in his possession, Matisse repeatedly sent it to exhibitions abroad. In 1912 the picture was featured in the next to the first Post-Impressionist Exhibition at the Grafton Gallery in London,(7) and in 1913 in the International Exhibition of novel Art, better known as the Armory display in New York.(8) Visitors to the Armory exhibit were offended by the work's distortions and bright colors.(9) Still, Matisse considered The Young Sailor II to be among his strongest works. When it was glance ated that, given the public's negative reply to the work, he not include it in his 1915 exhibition at the Montros Gallery in fresh York, he insisted on sending it anyway.(10)

The identity of the figure depicted in the sum of two units versions of The Young Sailor has not at any time been known to historians. Of course, a knowledge of the sitter's identity is not essential for appreciating the work, would not contribute further to its importance nor shed more light upon the artist's working methods. It has been glance ated in the vast literature upon Matisse that the artist's son Pierre (1900-1989) serv as prototype even though the latter was sole six years old at that time.(11) In of recent origin York in May 1988, I asked Pierre about the identity of the figure. He told me that the sitter was a sardine fisherman from Collioure who pos for his father for about single day.

One month after this conversation, end a curious combination of fortune and circumstance, my have research in Collioure led me to the likely identity of the sailor. This discovery be under the orders ofs as nothing more than an amusing footnote to the painting's history. However, the chance circumstances that l to my search (a claustrophobic house of entertainment that made me get up plenteous earlier than usual) and the longitudinal dimensions of this search (just single day in Collioure, about as drawn out as the presumed sitting for the picture itself) are worth relating here.

It was an early Sunday morning in June 1988 After I fl my cheap overdecorated [i]cabaret[/i] room in Collioure, a small village upon the Mediterranean near the Spanish border, I place myself on a bench overlooking the harbor. Four of advanced age fishermen had just returned with their small boat. As I watched these men working upon their vessel, I thought of my novel talk with Pierre Matisse in of recent origin York.