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Cuckoo Clocks, Blue and Pink Carpets by Henri Matisse is one of those images that never dates. Our studio recreates it as a hand painted oil painting — textured, color-rich, and ready to hang as canvas wall art in an entryway, study, or reception area.
Les coucous, tapis bleu et rose, 1911
Oil on canvas
81 x 65.5 cm. (31 7/8 x 25 3/4 in.)
Les coucous, tapis bleu et rose, painted in the spring of 1911, belongs to a long experimental sequence based in these years on flowers or fruit and textiles. This particular sub-series was inspired by the Nature morte au géranium of 1910 (fig. 1), a canvas which aroused such passionate enthusiasm in Wassily Kandinsky that he persuaded the Russian collector, Sergei Shchukin, to commission two more still-lifes of the same size on the same theme that winter3. What impressed Kandinsky, Shchukin and the painting's owner, Baron Tschudi, the director of Germany's imperial museums, was the boldness of Matisse's colour, and the unequivocal modernity of his abstract construction. He built his picture round a length of printed cotton known as the toile de Jouy, a favourite and much-painted textile, what Matisse called 'a key volume from my painter's library'4. In Nature morte au géranium the toile de Jouy plunges diagonally across the canvas with the momentum of a waterfall or whirlwind, sweeping the real flower-heads into the careering rhythms of its floral print, assimilating the painted bowl or cushion at the centre of the composition, simultaneously aerating and flattening out the entire picture plane while absorbing the white walls of Matisse's studio within its own chromatic scheme of turquoise, blue and pink.
Les Coucous, based on another key volume from Matisse's textile library, is by comparison a model of lucidity and balance. It was painted exactly a year later, at the same time as the great Atelier rose (fig. 2), another cool, light-filled, linear canvas whose overall design centres on the "coloured stuffs" laid out across it like a palette: pale ochre rug, turquoise fabric screen with pink flower blobs, and at the centre what seems to be the same fabric that occupies the lower part of Les Coucous. This was a blue-and-white, hand-woven, woollen rug with a pattern of foliage, flowers, pomegranates and little animals, motifs that would change shape and colour on Matisse's canvases, shifting to pink or creamy yellow and back again to white. He said that the carpet had caught his eye in an antique shop in Madrid on a trip to Spain in the winter of 1910. "It's not in a very good state, but I'll be able to work a lot with it, I think," he told his wife5. He paid a revelatory visit to the Alhambra Palace in Granada before painting his new textile for the first time, combining it with a patterned sofa, a batch of Spanish shawls and the pot of geraniums specially purchased to fulfill Shchukin's order for a pair of still lifes6 (fig. 3): Canvases which transpose the standard still-life components of flowers, fruit and fabric into a riotous oriental frieze of swirling line and rich hot colour. The blue carpet regained stability and composure in the Atelier rose, which Matisse started as soon as he got back to France at the end of January, 1911. This was the first of four huge symphonic wall panels (also commissioned by Shchukin)7, whose influence would seep slowly and powerfully into Western painting over the next half century and more.
Every hand painted oil painting in this fine art series is finished on artist-grade canvas and checked against the original before it leaves the studio.
From primer to varnish, the work is done manually on artist-grade canvas. The absence of digital printing is deliberate: it keeps the fine art brushwork visible and gives the fauvist oil painting wall decor a museum-like finish.
As entryway wall decor, this canvas brings color and texture without visual noise. It scales well from a small study to a large entryway feature wall, and it is a reliable choice when shopping for fine art oil painting as a gift.
Browse our Henri Matisse Paintings selection for related fine art canvases, or commission this fine art image in a custom size. Every order is a hand painted oil painting, never a printed poster.
| Size | Price |
|---|---|
| 20 X 24 in | $47.98 |
| 24 X 36 in | $77.98 |
| 30 X 40 in | $104.48 |
| 36 X 48 in | $149.48 |
| 48 X 72 in | $291.98 |
The sizes shown are the reproduction canvas sizes we paint to order. The dimensions given in a work's description refer to the original artwork and will differ from the sizes offered here. Not sure? Read the size guide or e-mail us.
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Every canvas is painted by hand in oils on artist-grade stretched canvas, with an extra blank border left for framing. How to care for your painting.
Measurements are on the size guide, or e-mail [email protected] and we reply within one business day.
