Henri Matisse (1869-1954)

When Matisse executed this freely interpreted copy after an écorché in 1903, the original sculpture, representing a flayed man measuring ten inches in height, was believed to have been by Michelangelo. It has been subsequently attributed to the great French baroque sculptor Pierre Puget (1620-1694), who probably based his version on a Florentine Renaissance sculpture he saw during his travels in Italy. Matisse likewise included a plaster copy of the écorché in two paintings done in 1911, Interiéur avec aubergines (coll. Musée de Peinture et Sculpture, Grenoble), and Nature morte avec aubergines (Private collection). Both Cézanne and Matisse admired Michelangelo and Puget for their expressive shaping of sculptural form. Matisse wrote in his first published essay, Notes of a Painter, in 1908, "When we go into the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sculpture rooms at the Louvre and look, for example, at a Puget, we can see that the expression is forced and exaggerated to the point of being disquieting" (quoted in J. Flam, ed., Matisse on Art, Berkeley, 1995, p. 39).