Barbara Dauphin Duthuit, the wife of Henri Matisse’s grandson, has donated 61 works by Matisse to the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris. Most of the works were shown in the exhibition Matisse and Marguerite: Through Her Father’s Eyes which launched at the museum earlier this year. Dauphin Duthuit was married to the late Claude Duthuit, Matisse's grandson.
The works donated includes seven paintings, one sculpture, 28 drawings and eight etchings, most of which portray Marguerite Matisse, the painter’s eldest daughter whom he had with his model Caroline Joblaud in 1894.
Matisse acknowledged the child when she was three and she thereafter lived with the artist and his wife, Amélie. Marguerite married the Byzantine scholar Georges Duthuit, Claude’s father, in 1923; she died in 1982.
“Spanning the first half of the 20th century, this donation casts light on each period of the tender and complicit relationship between the painter and his sitter—from the childhood images Marguerite écrivant [Marguerite Writing, 1906-07] and Études pour Marguerite lisant [Studies for Marguerite Reading, 1906]) to the deeply moving portraits created in 1945 when Marguerite escaped deportation [because of] her involvement in the French Resistance,” a museum statement says.
“This [donation] joins a previously amassed collection of 20 works by Matisse, including two monumental versions of La Danse [The Dance] (1930-1933), permanently on view in a dedicated gallery at the heart of the museum,” adds the museum.