Matisse first came to Nice in 1917 at the age of 48 to recuperate from bronchitis he had caught whilst visiting his eldest son Jean, posted as an aeroplane mechanic to the airfield at Istres on windswept salt marshes thirty miles west of Marseilles. Matisse had left Paris in mid-December, catching the overnight train down. It was a long journey which left him physically ill.
After waiting four days in Marseilles with his patience close to breaking point, he finally managed to obtain permission to see his son. He was shocked by what he found. The young conscripts were cold, hungry and dirty, living ankle-deep in mud without latrines or anywhere to wash, except an icy stream once a week. He took Jean back with him to Marseilles on a 24-hour pass and treated him to the pleasures of shops, cafés and an evening out. The next day Matisse sent him back to camp, repleted with good food, wearing clean clothes and a warm army greatcoat.
But the shock of seeing his son’s terrible camp conditions and being out and about for days in cold & wet weather weakened Matisse still further and he caught a chill that slowly turned into bronchitis. Thus, after organising food & clothes parcels for Jean, he decided to journey along the coast to the sheltered Bay of Nice where he felt he could cure his illness with a few days rest and clement weather. He arrived on Christmas Day and took a room overlooking the sea front in the Hotel du Beau Rivage, then a modest hotel, located on Quai du Midi (now Quai des Etats-Unis). But the weather was just as bad as Marseilles: biting cold, high winds and driving rain. Matisse was sorely tempted to pack his bags and return home that first week. Nonetheless, he braved the weather to call on Renoir living just a few miles along the coast in Cagnes-sur-Mer in a pretty villa called “Les Collettes”. Perhaps his chat with Renoir helped, for Matisse stayed on in Nice, visiting the older painter thereafter on a regular basis. The cold made it difficult for Matisse to paint; his chilled hands could hardly hold a paintbrush and, on his infrequent painting sessions outdoors, he resorted to wearing sheepskin foot-warmers to stave off the cold. After a month of continuous downpours, Matisse had had enough and made up his mind to leave Nice and return to Paris.
But the next morning the weather was magnificent: clear, silvery and soft in spite of its amazing brilliance. The north wind had driven the clouds away and brought with it such luminosity of light that Matisse was captivated. He was overjoyed and resolved to stay in Nice.
By now his days were well structured and almost monastic in routine. He rose early, walked to his studio and worked throughout the morning, either painting or drawing in his studio with the light streaming though the window. A short break for a frugal lunch was followed by another working session drawing at the local art school before either visiting Renoir in Cagnes-sur-Mer with a roll of canvas under his arm or returning to his hotel room to play his violin. (He played so loudly and so obsessively that the hotel management banished him to a distant bathroom for fear of complaints from other guests). A simple supper and an early bedtime ended his working day.
His wife Amélia and daughter Marguerite travelled down to Nice in February to visit him; but they did not stay long. A note from Jean, (recuperating in Istres after a stay in hospital due to an abscess on his leg) told them that his wound had still not healed and that, worse, he had now developed abscesses on his arm and eye as well. Alarmed, Amélie and Marguerite rushed to his side leaving Matisse to continue his work in Nice. After their visit they caught the train from Marseillse back to Paris, where Marguerite needed to continue medical treatment on her throat.
In April, Matisse moved into a rented apartment when the war effort caused his hotel to be requisitioned by the American army, forcing Matisse to find accommodation elsewhere. He found it in a villa situated on Mont Boron, a beautiful 57 hectare parkland created in 1860 and located above the Port of Nice. Although the house was small and rather plain, his rooms faced west with panoramic views along the coast to Cagnes-sur-Mer and across the old town to the Estérel mountains beyond. He felt like a human being again as he rose each morning to watch the Mediterranean sun rise over the sea. This was a peaceful interlude for Matisse as he painted the wild roses, cypress trees, umbrella pines and Eucalyptus trees that grew in abundance on the hillside. But his stay at the villa was short-lived. Anguished by the strength and power of the German advance into Paris, he returned home at the end of June to be close to his family and remained away from his beloved Nice until December 1918, one month after the end of hostilities.
Upon his return, Matisse took a room at Hotel de la Méditerranée et de la Côte d’Azur (no longer exists today) on the Promenade des Anglais and spent each winter there from October to May for the next five years. Work monopolised him from the start: four days into his stay at the hotel he acquired a new model: her name was Antoinette Arnoud. Over the next two years, Matisse produced a steady stream of noteworthy paintings and drawings. In the spring of 1921, Arnoud’s place was filled by Henriette Darricarrère. She had been posing intermittently for Matisse for six months after he had first noticed her working as a film extra at the newly opened Studios de la Victorine on the western outskirts of Nice.
In 1921, perhaps tired of hotel rooms and the restrictions they imposed (he still played the violin to obsession), Matisse rented a two-room flat on the third floor of a house on Place Charles Félix. The high ceilinged rooms, spacious and lined with pretty white false mosaic tiles, looked out onto the sea through a vast picture window.
The house, known as Caïs de Pierlas Palace, had been built at the very end of the 17th century and completed the construction of the Palco (the former name of Cours Saleya) on the eastern side of Place Charles-Félix. Built by the Ribotti family, Counts of Valdeblore, it was acquired in the 18th century by the Caïs de Pierlas family, who decorated its façade with bas-reliefs. Happy in his new lodgings, Matisse leased the fourth floor in 1926, this remained his home until 1938. He retained his third-floor apartment as his art studio until 1928.
In 1927 Matisse became enthralled with canoeing and joined the Club Nautique de Nice, remaining a member for two years. He rowed every afternoon across the bay in his own skiff and painted in the morning when the light was right. His 154 outings at sea in nine months earned him a medal of assiduity, a source of great pride for him.
If painting eluded him throughout 1929, lithos however, flowed naturally surprising him by the ease and spontaneity with which he could draw straight onto copper plate or stone. Working sometimes six hours a days he produced three hundred works in five months. Perhaps despairing that he would ever find spontaneity with painting again, his thoughts slowly turned to Polynesia and travelling there with Amélia. But if 1929 was not such a good year for Henri Matisse, neither was it a good year for Amélia. Summer had found her prone in bed with kidney and spinal problems and at the beginning of October she collapsed; for several weeks she was very poorly. She revived sufficently to make the journey down to Nice in December but there was no longer any question of further travel as doctors confined her to bed until Easter the following year. Heavy in heart, Matisse set sail alone for New York in February 1930 aboard the Ile de France, and then, after a month in the United States set sail again in March onboard the RMS Tahiti for the South Seas. He didn’t return to France until the end of July, having been away five months.
In 1931 and back from his travels Matisse rented a very large garage on rue Désiré Niel situated just off Avenue Félix Faure (today known as l'Atelier Soardi) and a few blocks away from his studio on Place Charles-Félix which he temporarily turned into a studio. He had been commissioned by Dr Albert C. Barnes, a serious art collector who had established the Barnes Foundation in 1922 at Merion in Philadelphia, to paint a mural, The Dance, for three lunettes in the Main Gallery. The choice and form for the new work had been left entirely to Matisse. It seems that Matisse had never considered painting anything but a Dance and drew his creation freehand directly onto three adjacent canvases more than twice his height, using a stick of charcoal tied to a bamboo pole. It was a monumental work for which he resorted to the technique of gouache-covered paper for the first time. He finished it two years later in April 1933, drained both physically and mentally.
By 1934, Matisse’s marriage suffered another set back that slowly led to a separation. After the long and arduous ordeal of creating The Dance for the Barnes Foundation, his wife urged Matisse to take a short break from painting. After much discussion he finally relented. His publisher had a villa on the beautiful peninsula of St Jean-Cap Ferrat and, as Matisse had enjoyed visiting him while dazzled by the light and incredible landscape, they rented Villa Lou Mandiou, located near to the harbour for two months (his son Pierre is buried in the cemetary there). Although Matisse’s health was somewhat precarious, that of Amélia was equally so, if not more. In constant need of an attendant to care for her, she suggested a Russian who had proved a most dependable studio assistant and who they had employed before: her name was Lydia Delectorskaya.
Lydia had first worked for them in the autumn of 1932. It had been a six-months position, originally as a studio assistant for Matisse and then as a domestic for the household in general. Young, beautiful, strong and very competent, Lydia was the perfect companion for Amélia and as nanny for their grandson, Claude - Marguerite’s child.
Now, two years later, Lydia was back but this time under full-time employment. Everything seemed to be going well and so the following year (1935) they asked if she would consider moving in with them. She agreed and received room and board as well as a regular salary. Her competency, ability to organise, direct and manage the household was to be, sadly, her downfall. In addition to looking after Amélia, she was now posing for Matisse, managing his affairs as well as that of the household. And it is this working relationship, rather than any question of adultery, that precipated the crisis in Matisse’s marriage. Amélia felt lost and left out. Faced with an ultimatum from Amélia (“It’s her or me”), Matisse chose his wife and sacked Lydia. But it was too late. The damage to their marriage was done.
Matisse’s passion for birds (and especially doves) began during the summer of 1936. Back in Paris and strolling along the banks of the river Seine, his attention was drawn to the merchants selling a variety of caged song birds and doves. He’d returned home with five or six birds at a time and delighted in their shapes and colours, plumage and singing. His love of birds lasted the rest of his life. Nearing the end of his day, Matisse gave Picasso, who loved birds and had canaries and pigeons of his own, the last of his fancy pigeons. Picasso drew its portrait on the famous poster, Dove of Peace.
Although their marriage was still somewhat fragile, the Matisses had decided to stay on in Nice when their lease expired at Place Charles-Félix in the summer of 1938. To this end they had already bought two adjacent apartments in January that same year on the third floor in the old Excelsior-Regina Palace, the last and grandest of Nice’s imperial hotels, located above Nice in the hills of Cimiez. Constructed by Biasini in 1897, the entire west wing had been occupied by Queen Victoria in the 1890’s. By 1914 it had become obsolete and then boarded up for years after the First World War. It was finally converted into private apartments; Matisse being the first and, for a long time, the only purchaser. During renovation work on their new apartments, Matisse stayed at the British Hotel during the months of September and October and then moved into his new home in mid-November.
Sadly, the relationship between Matisse and his wife, already strained and difficult, had grown progressively worse and in February 1939 her lawyer drew up a deed of separation. One of its key provisions was that everything would be divided equally between the couple. Through these turbulent times, Matisse found consolation in his birds (by now nearly three hundred) which he had installed in a room tiled specially for them and tended by a birdman who came in daily. But days were to get darker still. On 1st September 1939, Hitler’s armies invaded Poland and two days later France followed Britain in declaring war; the Second World War had begun. Matisse departed immediately for Paris.
The artist returned to Nice at the end of October but stayed in extreme isolation and anonymity, going nowhere and seeing virtually no one except his models. The war seemed to fall into a lull so Matisse returned to Paris at the end of April 1940. While there he suffered acute stomach pains and a doctor had to be called, but found nothing wrong. At the beginning of May, news came that Hitler’s armies were again on the move, invading Norway and Denmark, then Belgium, Luxembourg and Holland. Two days later Hitler’s army was in France and bombs started falling on Paris. On June 14th German troops entered Paris, the government resigned and France capitulated. All seemed lost.
While in Paris Matisse had sent word to Lydia to ask if she would come back as his assistant (his wife had made it clear she had no intention of returning) as he needed someone to handle the day-to-day tasks that distracted him from working. Lydia arrived with a bouquet of white daisies and blue cornflowers from her Aunt’s garden on July 15th, St Henry’s Day. When word came that the Germans were closing in on Paris, she and Matisse fled, first taking the train down to Bordeax and later travelling down to St Jean de Luz, a coastal town near the Spanish border. This was the turning point in both their lives. Their working collaboration was to last right up to Matisse’s death in 1954. Her will throughout was indomitable; she typed, kept records and meticulous accounts and paid the household bills. She also organised Matisse’s correspondence and coordinated his business affairs with an iron grip as well as being his studio assistant and muse. And when called upon, even scoured the countryside on her bike for provisions during the war. Matisse claimed that his entire household came to a standstill in her absence which, in the light of what Lydia accomplished is anything, if not an understatement.
Returning with Lydia to Nice at the end of August Matisse came home to a deserted apartment. After assuring that his paintings, bronzes, furniture, record collection and hangings were safe in storage, he was left with just the bare necessities: a bed, a couple of wicker garden chairs, a table. By the autumn the war was starting to be encroach on Nice and punitive public cutbacks on fuel, food and transport started. The abdominal pains that had taken hold of Matisse in Paris in May and again in July, returned and nearly killed him. Lydia urgently contacted Marguerite who arrived and, much against the protests of hospital consultants, removed her father physically from his hospital bed for a difficult 12 hour train journey to reach the Parc de Lyon Clinic that was run by the Dominican Nuns of Grammond. The operation was performed by Dr Santy, assisted by Dr Leriche. Two days later Matisse suffered a pulmonary embolism, which he narrowly survived. By some miracle, Matisse started to improve and by the end of March he was well enough to leave the clinic and stay in an hotel. He was then 71 years old.
Although still very weak, his strength had improved enough to travel back to Nice at the end of May 1941. His aviary was now half full, his birds having died for lack of special ants’ eggs impossible to find in wartime. A pair of songthrushes he prized above all died soon after he returned as did his faithful companion, his dog Raudid. He engaged day and night nurses and found ways to restore some normality to his daily routine. He began drawing again. The days slipped by and summer turned to autumn and then gently into spring. But things were not boding well for Matisse. He had been bedridden since March with excruciating spasms of pain in his stomach and liver. By August of that year he had spent nearly six months in bed. And then, unbeknownst to him, his life and work were to change completely and culminate into the creation of his greatest work. In September that year he employed a temporary stand-in for his regular night nurse. The agency sent him a young, twenty-one year old student nurse: Monique Bourgeois.
Monique was a soldier’s child, and had suffered a very strict and rigid upbringing. Made homeless during the war, her family had been evacuated by cattle car from Metz to Nantes. The trip took three days and two nights. Her father, seriously wounded in the 1914-18 war was fatally injured during the Second World War and hospitalized in Purpan, a little village next to Toulouse. He was later moved to Vence where he died from his injuries in December 1940 at the age of 48. Monique was the eldest of three children and it now fell to her to provide for them and her mother. After a year in nursing school she made her way to Nice to find work at the nursing school placement office. She was in luck. An artist by the name of Henri Matisse was looking for a temporary night nurse. On September 26, 1942 she rang the bell to Matisse’s apartment in Cimiez. Lydia answered.
Monique quickly became comfortable with Matisse and soon their conversations turned more personal. Matisse spoke of himself, his family and his grandchildren whom he adored. He showed her pictures of his parents, of himself as a child and of his wife. Matisse explained that he had become very possessive and hard to please the older he got and Madame Matisse could no longer put up with his demands. Monique, on the other hand, admitted to him that she loved to draw and she brought Matisse several of her watercolours. When Matisse was able to, he got out of bed and showed Monique his studio and paintings. She cared for him for 15 nights, during which time he had several attacks in a row of severe stomach pains.
The return of Matisse’s regular night nurse drew an end to Monique’s duties. Wishing to continue her nursing studies Monique applied, and received, a scholarship that allowed her to continue. In between her studies, she would occasionally visit Matisse. With her he began to walk again, slowly at first around the lanes bordering the ancient Roman arenas of Cimiez. To help with her finances, Matisse asked if she would come and pose for him. She accepted. Lydia took her to what was called the “costume room” where she found a variety of different dresses intended for Matisse’s models in a large trunk. Matisse painted four canvases of her, as well as numerous sketches with charcoal or ink. She would sit in a pretty but rather uncomfortable straightbacked wooden seat for two or three hours at a time. Short periods of rest, no more than a quarter of an hour, were spent in total silence sipping a cup of tea. Their work together culminated in March 1943 with the painting of Tabac Royal.
Monique’s career then changed dramatically, as she took the veil on September 8, 1944 and given the name of Sister Jacques-Marie. She did not see Matisse again for two years.
In the meantime, Matisse had moved to Vence in June 1934. The war was still not over; Allied warships patrolled the Mediterranean preparing to invade Europe, and Nice was under the threat of Allied bombardment. Matisse thus decided to live further inland and asked his friend, André Rouveyre to look for a place for him; he found Villa Le Rêve.
The square ochre house with brown shutters had been built in 1930 for an English admiral on the outskirts of Vence, at the foot of a rocky white 673-metre Baou mountain. Framed by several huge, hundred year old palm trees, the villa was set in a garden full of pink laurels, yuccas, cypresses, olive trees and all manner of abundant plants.
Matisse brought with him his array of objects that had followed him from studio to studio for more than forty years. Simple, commonplace objects, others more exotic artefacts that he had brought back from his various travels, his books, his cats, Coussi and Minouche, and a few caged doves. The walls of his bedroom were hung with Polynesian tapa cloths and Kasaï textiles from the Belgian Congo. Lydia, now his nurse, assistant and muse was his only companion in the house. Josette, the housekeeper and cook lived in the village.
This was the first time he had ventured out of his home in more than two and a half years. Walking was still very difficult and he could only manage a few hundred yards. He set up his room and studio on the ground floor of the villa which opened out onto a terrace with steps leading down to a garden. Silence reigned in the villa with the absence of a phone or car as if the villa itself was wrapped in a cocoon.
Unable to paint, Matisse reverted to drawing on paper, copper plate or linoleum. He worked more and more by night or indoors with the shutters closed when he found it hard to see properly in daylight. Linocuts gave him the spontaneity that he so enjoyed as did the scissors-and-paper cut technique that he had done four years earlier. That first year in Vence Matisse created the triumphant cut-paper inventions of Jazz. Matisse arranged boldly coloured paper cutouts into striking compositions, and then added text in his own handwriting to produce a book that has been referred to as “the visual counterpart of jazz music”. He made his famous collages from white paper hand-painted with specially pigmented gouache. Matisse originally planned to call his book “The Circus” but changed his mind as he wrote the text. The book was issued as a portfolio of 20 colour plates and published by Tériade.
On September 9, 1943, the Germans entered Nice. Matisse’s basement at the Villa Le Rêve was commandeered as a canteen for German soldiers heading down to the Italian front. Vence became part of a military support zone. Air raid sirens broke the silence in Vence as Allied bombers attacked the South of France.
Matisse needed a very regular life if he wanted to work. Between sittings he would rest and take tea with his model and then smoke a cigar, play with his cat or take a turn round the garden. Then visitors would call; journalists and photographers came as did Picasso and Françoise Gilot from Antibes and Bonnard from Le Cannet. Rouveyre, who lived the other side of the village, would visit often too.
Matisse spent much of winter 1944 in bed, working on his Jazz illustration. In April he was stunned when he received the terrible news that both his wife and daughter had been arrested by the Gestapo, (Marguerite in Rennes and his wife in Paris), for their collaboration with the Resistence. Anguish gnawed at him daily that he collapsed in a fever with symptoms similar to his abdominal problems of two years earlier. It was the middle of August before he was well enough to get out of bed and, by this time, Allied forces were landing along the coast between Marseille and Nice. Paris was liberated on August 24. Amélia was released at the beginning of October while news came through that Marguerite had been freed too.
In 1946, the first great Matisse exhibition was held in Nice in the stunning Palais de la Méditerranée situated Promenade des Anglais. It was to be several years later, in 1950, before Nice would hold a second exhibition devoted to the artist; the venue this time would be Galerie des Ponchettes on Quai des Etats-Unis and just a stone’s throw away from his old apartment on Place Charles-Felix. Inaugurated by Matisse himself, its opening triggered the French Riviera’s great artistic adventure, followed by the opening of the many museums that still characterize the region.
The summer of 1947 found Matisse more lonely and isolated than ever before in Vence. But the unexpected return of Monique Bourgeois, (now as Sister Jacques-Marie) provided the companionship and comfort that Matisse craved for. This gentle and sensitive soul was now working as a novice at the Foyer Lacordaire, just 100 metres away from Villa Le Rêve. The Foyer Lacordaire had been established as a nursing home run by Dominican nuns who had also set up a makeshift chapel in a derelict garage next door.
During her spare moments, Monique sketched out a little stained-glass window for the derelict building, little knowing the ramifications her drawing was going to make. At her next visit to Villa Le Rêve, she somewhat hesitantly showed Matisse her sketch and asked for his advice. His disproportionately enthusiastic response left her stunned to what, she felt, was a rather mundane drawing. But the die had been cast and Matisse had been inspired and was on the verge of creating his greatest work of art yet.
Towards the end of the year a young Dominican monk from Paris came to visit the Foyer Lacordaire. His name was Brother Rayssiguier. After a warm welcome from the Mother Superior he asked if anyone famous lived in the village and she told him about Matisse. She also told him to introduce himself to Matisse as the architect of their future chapel who wished to discuss with him their project of stained glass windows. Their meeting went well and plans were soon afoot to create the chapel. Little did either of them know then that this ultimate creation would demand so much from them both with hundreds of preparatory drawings, endless new restarts and anguished sleepless nights.
Matisse’s fresh colours and joyous works for the chapel included three black-and-white murals, three semi-abstract stained glass windows, a stone altar, a bronze cross, carved doors, and an array of colorful vestments. There is a distinct feeling of spaciousness, although the chapel is only 15 metres long, 6 metres wide and 5 metres high. The floor, walls, and ceiling are white and plain, simple and clear cut.
The altar stands at the centre opposite the two naves and is made of three blocks of stone. The theme of three occurs throughout Matisse’s design for the chapel - which some believe to be a representation of God, The Son and The Holy Ghost. The stone came from Rogne and was the same type the Romans used to build the bridge over the river Gard. It was selected for its warm colour and resemblance to brown bread - the symbol of the Bread of the Eucharist. Set in the middle of the stone slab is the tabernacle and engraved by the artist, the crucifix, shaped by Matisse, presides over the altar as a whole. To complete the set of three is the ciborium decorated with an original aquatint.
It is difficult to imagine the uproar the designs for the chapel caused at that time. Everyone who visits the chapel nowadays is enchanted by Matisse’s work and incredible use of colours, yet this was not so throughout its many construction phases, and even the press had a field day. The story of the celebrated artist enticed by a pure young nun made headline news in newspapers, on newsreels and in fashion magazines around the world. For Monique, this was only one of many private miseries she would have to endure in four years of increasing friction. Her fellow nuns at the Foyer Lacordaire stubbornly resisted the chapel from the start, and for the conservative majority of the Church, Matisse’s creations for the chapel were not just monstrous but blasphemous as well. Brother Rayssiguier also came under fire and his attempts to mediate between Matisse, the nuns and the builders often exasperated all parties. By the end of 1948, after nine months of intensive planning, the chapel had outgrown the Vence workshop. Matisse therefore decided to transfer everything back to the much larger spaces of his old studio in Cimiez and returned with his household to the Excelsior-Regina in the first week of January 1949. Matisse was now 80 years old.
On 12th December 1949, the first stone of the chapel was laid at Vence in a ceremony that Matisse was too frail to attend. Later, it was Pierre, his son, who represented his father at the consecration of the chapel on 25th June, 1951, a ceremony conducted by the Archbishop of Nice. By then, Matisse was suffering from cardiac fatigue, compounded by unusual insomnia, breathing difficulties and a deterioration in his eyesight. Towards the end of 1952, Matisse’s handwriting faltered for the first time. He now no longer visited Paris preferring instead to spend the summers of 1953 and 1954 in a villa in the countryside near Vence.
Lydia, distraught, stayed continually by his side unable to bear leaving him for even a moment. By the middle of October 1954 his heart began to fail and he suffered a stroke on November 1st. He died November 3rd, at four o’clock in the afternoon in his studio at Cimiez, his daughter and Lydia at his side. He was 85 years old.
Lydia left the very next day, suitcase in hand; Amélia Matisse returned as her husband’s widow.
Note:
We would like to thank both Les Héritiers de Matisse in Paris and the Foyer Lacordaire in Vence, for their kind permission and assistance in letting us take photos of the inside of Chapel Rosaire and to publish them on our website as well as permitting us the reproduction of the beautiful Matisse painting “Algue blanche sur fond rouge et vert”.
Photo Credits: Les Héritiers Matisse
© Succession H. Matisse “Algue blanche sur fond rouge et vert”, 1947.
