Studio accademico di un uomo

Around 1900 Matisse was 30 and nearly broke, painting evening life classes to keep his hand in. That year he did something reckless with money he did not have: he bought a small canvas of bathers by Cezanne from the dealer Vollard, and kept it for the next 37 years as a kind of private teacher. You can feel that purchase in this standing nude. The colour is pushed hard, blue and rust laid against the flesh so the body reads almost as sculpture, built up in blocks rather than smoothly modelled. It is a life-class exercise, the sort every student did, yet Matisse is already treating the model less as anatomy to copy than as a problem of weight and contrast. He would leave this kind of academic drill behind within a few years.