Image source: artvee.com
Introduction to the Painting
“Landscape around Nice” condenses the Riviera’s quicksilver light into a compact orchestra of greens, blacks, and sky blues. Tree masses tilt and interlock; trunks sweep across the surface in supple arcs; flashes of sea open through gaps in foliage; and the whole scene is held together by a calligraphic scaffolding of dark contours. Henri Matisse paints neither a topographic record nor a picturesque view. He paints the sensation of standing in scrubby Mediterranean terrain and watching air, light, and growth knit themselves into pattern.
Nice in 1918: A Reset After Upheaval
The date 1918 marks a reset. The war was concluding, and Matisse had begun what would soon be called his Nice period, a stretch defined by clarity of light, domestic interiors, and poise. “Landscape around Nice” sits at the threshold of that turn. It keeps the measured palette and structural economy he refined during the war years and brings them south to meet the Riviera’s brightness. Instead of the blazing Fauvist shocks of 1905 or the hushed gray-green Maintenon scenes of the same year, we find a middle octave: clear, breathable color, simplified forms, and an emphasis on rhythm over description. The landscape becomes a testing ground for ideas that will soon animate his sunlit rooms and odalisques.
A Composition Built on Arabesques
Matisse anchors the painting with a great leaning trunk that sweeps from the lower center toward the top edge, its bend echoed by branching limbs throughout the grove. Arabesque is the right word—the line curves, divides, and recombines with musical inevitability. Around this central gesture he groups rounded tree heads and shaggy shrubs like notes on a staff. The ground slopes gently forward and left, while the canopy closes in from the right, so the eye is coaxed along a path that is more dance than march. This choreography prevents the landscape from dissolving into a wall of leaves. Instead, it reads as a set of counter-movements—upward thrusts, lateral fans, and small rebounds—held in balance by the dominant sweep of the trunk.
Windows of Distance and the Role of the Sea
At the horizon, small wedges of ultramarine and lilac announce the Mediterranean. They are modest in size yet critical in effect. Those blue slivers act as breaths between the denser greens, confirming depth without dragging the composition into conventional perspective. They also cool the palette and tune the painting’s temperature. With just a few strokes Matisse establishes the place: sun struck foliage in front, marine brilliance beyond. The sea functions like a sustained note around which the nearer forms vibrate.
Color Language: Greens in Many Keys
The chromatic center is green, but green in multiple registers. There are lemon-tinted patches that suggest newly lit leaves, olive-brown passages that imply shade, viridian flashes on a sun-angled shrub, and cool bluish notes in distant trees. Matisse refuses monotony by shifting temperature and value rather than multiplying hues indiscriminately. Black, used frankly, deepens shadows and outlines without deadening them; it is an active color in his hands, the ink of his pictorial calligraphy. Ochres and straw tones warm the ground, and the sky holds a clean, nearly unmixed blue that clarifies the whole chord. The few purplish touches tucked into the foliage are small but decisive complements, preventing the greens from closing in on themselves.
Light and the Mediterranean Air
Light here is not modeled as spotlight and shadow but as a pervasive condition. Edges are crisp where trunks cross sky and softer where foliage overlaps foliage. Highlights arrive as small, milky strikes on leaves or as pale emulsions brushed across the canopy; shadows strengthen into cool, dark greens and blacks that contour the forms without burying them. The sensation is of dry, lucid air—no mist, little haze—so that forms pop forward and sit firmly on the surface. This clarity is the atmospheric equivalent of Matisse’s ambition for clarity in form: the world should be legible at a glance and satisfying on a second look.
Drawing with the Brush
The drawing is made by paint rather than graphite. Trunks are laid down in long, elastic strokes that thicken and thin as they travel, announcing the pressure and speed of the hand. Where a branch kinks or meets another, Matisse lets the stroke break and resume, preserving the action rather than smoothing it into anonymity. Leaf masses are built from short, rounded dabs and small scallops whose edges often retain a ridge of pigment. The contour of a shrub may be completed by the meeting of two differently colored areas rather than by a separate outline. These tactics keep the surface alive and honest: you can reconstruct the decisions and feel the time of painting in your eyes.
Surface, Touch, and the Scale of Marks
Although the scene opens outward, the facture is intimate. Thinly painted passages allow the canvas weave to participate; thicker strokes catch light like bark ridges. The size of the marks matches the scale of the panel, so that from a modest distance the image reads as coherent masses, while up close it resolves into a lively grammar of touches and drags. That double readability—pattern from afar, touch at hand—will become a signature of the Nice interiors, where a screen or curtain must be both decorative field and record of the artist’s hand.
Space Without Theatrics
Depth is organized as shallow terraces: foreground shrubs and the dark base of trunks; a middle band of interlaced trees; and the far band where sea and sky appear. There is no plunging vista, no one-point perspective. Instead, overlapping masses and value steps sort near from far. This restraint suits Matisse’s broader preference for the primacy of the picture plane. Space is present—felt, believable—but the canvas remains proudly a flat field where shapes meet and harmonize.
From Nature to Ornament
One of the painting’s key achievements is the conversion of natural growth into ornamental order without sacrificing life. The rhythm of trunks and tufted crowns reads as a repeating motif, almost a frieze of vegetal forms. Yet nothing is static. Each tree tilts at a slightly different angle; each leaf cluster swells or thins in response to light; the central trunk’s arc initiates variations across the grove. Matisse is not abstracting nature into a rigid pattern; he is discovering the pattern that living nature already proposes and amplifying it until it carries the whole image.
Editing as a Way of Seeing
Much is left out. There are no species-specific details, no stones or sticks described for their own sake, no tiny figures placed to explain scale. The ground is a patchwork of ochre, sage, and dark green laid broadly, with only a few accents to indicate paths or clearings. By pruning description, Matisse gives weight to the few incidents he keeps: the lean of the trunk, the cool flash of the sea, the bright hits of leaf-green. This editing is not a trick; it is the painter’s way of focusing attention on relations—of curve to curve, light to shadow, warm to cool—rather than on inventory.
Movement and the Viewer’s Path
The composition invites the eye to travel. One enters along the bright green shrub at left, is pulled by the central trunk’s rise, slips into the pocket of light just beyond, and then leaps outward through the blue wedges toward the sea. The right side’s heavier masses return the eye to the center, setting up a loop rather than a straight march. This movement is quiet, almost meditative, aligned with the painting’s emotional temperature, which is more reflective than ecstatic.
Kinship with the Maintenon Canvases
Compared with the gray-green riverbank views Matisse painted at Maintenon in the same year, “Landscape around Nice” shares a discipline of palette and a reliance on structural curves. But it departs in temperature and openness. The Maintenon works feel cooler, their air heavier; the Nice canvas breathes. Maintenon’s water reflects tree silhouettes; Nice’s sea irradiates the scene as a cool constant. The difference is not only geographic. It signals the pivot from measured, introspective studies toward images that open out toward light and pleasure.
Prelude to the Nice Interiors
Soon after this canvas Matisse would set up studios flooded with Mediterranean sun, stage screens and textiles, and pose models in rooms that were themselves instruments of pattern. “Landscape around Nice” reads as a rehearsal. The tree masses behave like the patterned fields of a screen; the black trunks anticipate the strong linear accents that will hold those interiors together; the small blue sea behaves like a window that sets the key of the entire room. The lesson is clear: once you can organize a grove by a few decisive shapes and a tuned palette, you can organize anything—chair, cloth, figure, and view—into a coherent decorative whole.
The Expressive Use of Black
Black often frightens colorists; Matisse makes it sing. Here it articulates structure—the joints and bends of trunks, the deep notches between shrubs—while also sharpening nearby hues. A black sweep laid next to a pale green intensifies the green without dirtying it. In places the black softens into a warm brown, in others it is cool and ink-like; this variety keeps it from feeling formulaic. The confident use of black as an emphatic, not merely neutral, color is one of his mature tools, already perfectly deployed in this landscape.
The Mediterranean as Memory and Device
The Riviera was not new to Matisse, but in 1918 it became a device for recalibration. The combination of crystalline light, evergreen foliage, and sea horizon simplifies the world into a few enduring elements. Those elements encourage the painter to distill: sky as open field, sea as band, trees as arabesques. “Landscape around Nice” takes full advantage of that reduction. It feels both specific—this grove, this sun, this coastal gap—and archetypal, a template for Mediterranean seeing.
Emotional Register: Composure, Not Spectacle
The painting’s feeling is composed. The energy resides in the line’s flex and the subtle shifts of temperature rather than in chromatic fireworks. Greens dominate but do not shout; the sky is fresh but not theatrical; the sea glints without insisting. The mood suits a year of recovery. It suggests a painter who trusts calm as a value and finds vitality in balance rather than in extremes.
Why the Picture Still Feels Modern
The canvas remains modern because it puts faith in essentials: a few interlocking shapes, a limited but finely tuned palette, and a surface that tells the truth about its making. It is not an illustration of a walk but a construction that yields the experience of one. That clarity—neither schematic nor sentimental—travels well across time. Viewers can read it quickly and then return for the slow pleasures of brush and edge.
Conclusion: A Grove Tuned to a Key
“Landscape around Nice” is a small summit of Matisse’s art at a pivotal moment. It turns a humble stand of trees into a composed music of arabesque and color. The sea’s blue sets the key; black writes the melody of trunks; greens in many registers supply harmony; and the sky holds the whole in a bright silence. The picture holds stillness and movement in one hand, nature and ornament in the other. It is both a record of a place and an argument about how to see, and it leads directly to the serene inventions that would define his 1920s.