Matisse in the Studio, which opens at London’s Royal Academy of Arts (RA) on 5 August (until 12 November) after its debut at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, includes more than the objects that the French artist held most dear. A painting by Matisse of his only daughter, Marguerite, aged 13, has been lent by the Musée Picasso-Paris. The star loan comes from the key years of 1906 and 1907 when both artists first drew inspiration from African masks and sculpture to produce radically new works depicting the human face and body. Controversial at the time, Matisse’s Russian patron, Sergei Shchukin, accurately predicted: “The public is against you but the future is yours.” Matisse painted his daughter from early childhood during which she nearly died from diphtheria, as a fashionable young woman and finally when prematurely aged after imprisonment and torture by the Gestapo for being a member of the Resistance during the Occupation. The portrait of the young Marguerite on show at the RA had a special place in Picasso’s studio. It was the one he handpicked when in 1907 the artists exchanged paintings.
