Striped Jacket 1914

Henri Matisse painted this portrait, called 'Striped Jacket', using oil on canvas. The stripes, the hat, the sketchy green, the overall color – it’s all about process here. Look closely at the vertical blue stripes; they are not perfect lines, are they? Some are thick, some are thin, some wobble, they’re like a visual record of his hand moving down the canvas. The paint seems pretty thin, so he probably wasn’t building up layers and layers. Instead, the whole thing feels light, and provisional. The jacket looks like it was fun to paint. I think you can really see the physicality of the medium, the movement of the brush, the choices of colour. It reminds me a little of Manet, and some of his portraits. But Matisse really makes it his own. Ultimately, art is about embracing ambiguity, and it is a conversation across time.