"I have always considered drawing not as an exercise of particular dexterity… but as a means deliberately simplified so as to give simplicity and spontaneity to the expression, which should speak without clumsiness, directly to the mind of the spectator." -Henri Matisse

Matisse considered his drawings to be a very intimate means of expression. The artist often made drawings to inform his paintings and sculptures, feeling that these drawings should be quick, gestural exercises that captured the form and emotion evoked in him by the subject. This work exhibits the purity of form and expressivity one expects from this famed master. Exemplary of his avant-garde approach to line and form, this lithograph represents the artist's intense concentration on economy of line and negative space. Henri Matisse was undoubtedly one of the foremost painters of the first half of the 20th Century.