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Roger Fry's Matisse

The painting by Matisse once owned by Roger Fry and left by him to Vanessa Bell will be offered for sale by The Court Gallery at the 20/21 International Art Fair in February

In her acclaimed biography of Matisse, Hilary Spurling records that in December 1917 Matisse went to Marseilles with Albert Marquet with the intention of seeing his eldest son Jean who was serving in the army and had recently been posted to the airfields at Istres about 30 miles west of Marseilles. Spurling writes 'He took the overnight train to Marseilles on Thursday, 13 December, booked in at the Hotel Beauvau... The port was full of troops en route for Italy, and Matisse, who had to wait four days for permission to see Jean, calmed his impatience by experimenting with a brand-new, lightweight, portable paint-box. On his first day, he made two paintings in the harbour...' The two plein air studies were painted on exactly the same size wood panels that no doubt fitted perfectly in his new portable paint-box. The other work painted on that day, Port de Marseilles, was formerly in the collection of Pierre-Noel Matisse and was sold by Christie's in New York in November 2010 for $578,500.

The present painting was, by June 1918, with Matisse's contracted dealers, Galerie Bernheim-Jeune who sold it on 19 December to J. L. Rayner. In the following year Rayner consigned it to the Eldar Gallery in London for their exhibition of French art. It was at this exhibition in January 1920 that Roger Fry first saw the picture and set his heart on somehow acquiring it, but unable to proceed with the purchase on that occasion, he was given a second chance in 1924 when he was offered the painting by the Paris dealer Epstein. He recorded his purchase in a letter to Vanessa Bell dated 6 March 1924: 'I have gone and committed a new folly, tempted as usual by Epstein. I've got a little Matisse for which I have longed ever since I saw it years ago at the Eldar Gallery in London and I've got a nude of Bonnard. Epstein takes as part payment one of my Vlamincks. I expect I've not been so very foolish really. It generally turns out that I'm not.' A surviving photograph shows that the Matisse took pride of place in the sitting room of his London home. It is interesting that Fry should have chosen this particular work by Matisse and Professor Christopher Green has written: 'Fry's acceptance that Matisse could be “realistic” and a “pure” painter at the same time is underlined by his one purchase of a work by him, a small Harbour Scene of 1917. It's free handling and tonal scale relate, for instance, to the little pictures Matisse painted at Etretat during the Nice period.'

Not surprisingly Roger Fry's Matisse became a touchstone for the Bloomsbury Group and in her biography of Fry, Virginia Woolf recalled the atmosphere of visiting him at 48 Bernard Street: 'His guests found him writing. He had forgotten the time; he was trying to finish a lecture. But he was delighted to stop writing and to begin to talk. The room was untidy as ever. Ink-bottles and coffee-cups, proof sheets and paint-brushes were piled on the tables and strewn on the floor. And there were the pictures – some framed, others stood against the wall. There was the Derain picture of a spectral dog in the snow; the blue Matisse picture of ships in harbour.' Roger Fry left the painting in his will to Vanessa Bell – a touching memento of their very deep friendship. Thereafter the painting hung in the garden room at Charleston for many years and indeed it features in a number of Vanessa Bell's interior paintings of the 1930s and 40s. The painting was finally sold by Vanessa's daughter, Angelica Garnett, through the London dealer Anthony D'Offay to an American collector.

The painting will be offered for sale by The Court Gallery at the forthcoming 20/21 International Art Fair at the Royal College of Art, 16-19th February 2012