Printer: Mourlot (1,500 Editions)

Dimensions: 81 x 59 cm

Condition: Good condition, minor ink stain on the left side.

Frame: Framed in oak

Description:   

Even two centuries after her death, Madame de Pompadour, Louis XV’s legendary mistress, confidante and great patron of the arts, was still being celebrated at the heart of cultured Paris.

This piece is less poster and more invitation, designed by Henri Matisse for the annual ball of the École des Arts Décoratifs, held at the Pavillon de Marsan in the Louvre complex on 20 November 1951. Rather wonderfully, it announces that “Madame de Pompadour receives” her guests at 10pm, casting one of France’s great cultural tastemakers as the imaginary hostess of the evening, despite her having died almost two centuries earlier.

Matisse was 81 when he created it, during one of the most inventive periods of his career. Following major surgery for a rare form of intestinal cancer in 1941, his reduced mobility had led him to develop his celebrated cut-paper technique, or what he called “drawing with scissors”.

Madame de Pompadour is particularly special because it brings together two defining elements of Matisse’s late work. Brilliant blocks of cut-paper colour sit alongside an extraordinarily economical brush drawing of a woman’s face. With just a handful of sweeping black lines, Matisse gives her remarkable character, while even the loose handwritten lettering becomes part of the composition.

Printed by the legendary Mourlot atelier in Paris in an edition of 1,500, this is an original lithographic poster from 1951, not a later reproduction. Examples of Madame de Pompadour are now held in major museum collections including The Museum of Modern Art and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Created just three years before Matisse’s death, it captures an artist still experimenting at 81. Bold, joyful and strikingly modern, it is also a wonderful surviving piece of Parisian social history, created not simply to hang on a wall, but to invite its recipient to a ball at the Louvre.