Girl with a Fur Coat 1944

Henri Matisse painted this canvas, Girl with a Fur Coat, in 1944, and it’s interesting to consider it as a document of a period of intense creativity for the artist. Here, Matisse is thinking about how to create form with colour, and he’s using these really fluid lines to define the shapes in the painting. The textures are really quite varied; the background has these patterned areas, and the fur coat, which, let’s be honest, looks more like a draped scarf, is rendered in this light purple that really pops against the orange backdrop. If you look closely at the dress, it's possible to see how Matisse allows the grey underpainting to peek through, adding depth and shadow with these thin, almost transparent layers of paint. Look at the way he’s defined the figure's face with just a few strokes of pink – it’s amazing how much expression he achieves with so little detail. You can see the influence of artists like Gustav Klimt here. I think this piece is part of a conversation Matisse was having with his contemporaries. It feels like an open question, which is why it still excites us today.