Original Henri Matisse Travel Vintage Poster for Nice France Created in 1947

Whether working as a draftsman, a sculptor, a printmaker or a painter, Henri Matisse was a master of color. Although classically trained at the Académie Julian, in Paris, he quickly abandoned traditional techniques and genres to pioneer a style all his own, marked by quick, gestural strokes and fluid contours.

Along with fellow painter André Derain, Matisse was the leading proponent of Fauvism, a movement whose name is derived from the French word for "wild beast.” Marked by vibrant hues, Fauvist paintings like Matisse’s famous 1906 composition Le Bonheur de vivre use wild, active brushstrokes and a palette unconstrained by nature, resulting in women with purple skin and trees with orange leaves. Often, these compositions unite pure color with the white of exposed canvas to create a sense of transparency and light.

In addition to masterful landscapes and still lifes, Matisse loved to paint erotic subjects, particularly the female nude. Rejecting strict realism, he distilled the form into its essential parts and then translated these into voluptuous, rounded contours. With its striking colors and sculptural modeling of the figure, Odalisque couchée aux magnolias is among Matisse’s most famous works — and the most expensive work of his ever sold — depicting Henriette Darricarrère, his muse and favorite model for around seven years, lounging luxuriously in his Nice studio. In pictures like the lithograph Nu Bleu, he explored the expressive power of a body in motion by placing his figures in twisted or contorted poses, transforming their limbs into tangles of color and shape that push figure painting toward abstraction.

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Mourlot Studios was a commercial print shop founded in 1852 by the Mourlot family and located in Paris, France. It was also known as Imprimerie Mourlot, Mourlot Freres and Atelier Mourlot. Founded by Francois Mourlot, it started off producing wallpaper. Later, his son Jules Mourlot would expand the business to handle the production of chocolate labels for companies such as Chocolat Poulain, as well as ledgers, maps and stationery. Starting in the 1920s, Jules' son, Fernand Mourlot, converted one of the locations into a studio dedicated to printing fine art lithography.