Le Jeune Marin II

Matisse spent the summer of 1906 in Collioure, a fishing village on the Mediterranean near the Spanish border, and there he painted a local sardine fisherman named Germain Montargès, then about 18. This is the second version. The first is more naturalistic; here the outlines are firmer and the colour drops into broad flat zones of pink, green and blue, the young man's face almost a mask. The Fauves — Matisse among them — had shocked Paris only months earlier with colour used this freely. He seems to have felt the risk himself: for a while he told visitors, only half in jest, that a local postman had painted it.