Plum Blossoms, Green Background, 1948 Henri Matisse (1869-1954)

We create our paintings with museum quality and covering the highest academic standards. Once we get your order, it will be entirely hand-painted with oil on canvas. All the materials we use are the highest level, being totally artist graded painting materials and linen canvas.

We will add 1.6" (4 cm) additional blank canvas all over the painting for stretching.

High quality and detailing in every inch are time consuming. The reproduction of Henri Matisse also needs time to dry in order to be completely ready for shipping, as this is crucial to not be damaged during transportation.
Based on the size, level of detail and complexity we need 8-9 weeks to complete the process.

In case the delivery date needs to be extended in time, or we are overloaded with requests, there will be an email sent to you sharing the new timelines of production and delivery.

TOPofART wants to remind you to keep patient, in order to get you the highest quality, being our mission to fulfill your expectations.

We not stretch and frame our oil paintings due to several reasons:
Painting reproduction is a high quality expensive product, which we cannot risk to damage by sending it being stretched.
Also, there are postal restrictions, regarding the size of the shipment.
Additionally, due to the dimensions of the stretched canvas, the shipment price may exceed the price of the product itself.

You can stretch and frame your painting in your local frame-shop.

Once the painting Plum Blossoms, Green Background is ready and dry, it will be shipped to your delivery address. The canvas will be rolled-up in a secure postal tube.

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The paintings we create are only of museum quality. Our academy graduated artists will never allow a compromise in the quality and detail of the ordered painting. TOPofART do not work, and will never allow ourselves to work with low quality studios from the Far East. We are based in Europe, and quality is our highest priority.

The picture confronts us with a theatrical mise en scène: a scarlet tablecloth spills across the lower half of the canvas, anchoring a still life of ripe lemons nested in a blue scalloped dish, a stout stoneware jar packed with sprigs of plum blossom, and a spray of cut flowers hastily propped in paper-wrapped cones. Behind this chromatic stage a young woman, hair neatly looped, occupies a pale chair; her features remain deliberately undeclared, reducing her presence to a calm silhouette. Two ultramarine window apertures puncture the jade green wall, itself animated by a rhythmic stencil of black leaf-shapes. The whole is both interior and pattern, scene and ornament.

Colour, as ever with Matisse, orchestrates sensation. The red of the table vibrates against the surrounding greens, releasing a warmth that seems to pulse forward. Blossoms are rendered in tremulous dabs of pink and white, their delicacy amplified by the heavier session of neighbouring hues. Within the windows a cool blue retreats, suggesting distance without modelling. Tonal modulation is minimal; instead, flat planes of intense pigment lock together to form a lattice of relationships. The palette is at once celebratory and exacting, calibrated to hold the eye in a perpetual circuit of contrasts and echoes.

Paint has been laid down with a broad, confident brush, the strokes visible, almost declarative. Edges remain porous, allowing under-layers and quick revisions to flicker through. One senses speed - a painter determined to arrest a vision before it evaporates. Yet the apparent spontaneity masks calculation: areas of unpainted canvas peek through, providing essential breaths of neutrality. The simplified facial oval anticipates the paper cut-outs that would soon dominate the studio in Vence; indeed, the crisp silhouette of the plum branches already suggests scissors as much as bristles.

Compositionally, the vertical thrust of the flowering branches counterbalances the horizontal sweep of the crimson cloth, while the angled windows steer the gaze back toward the seated figure. Repetition of leaf motifs along the wall establishes a decorative ground against which the still life elements project. The lemons form a compact ellipse, a visual fulcrum amid the flurry of stems and petals. Successive diagonals - blossoms leaning left, bouquet tilting right - create a subtle seesaw that animates the otherwise frontal arrangement.

Painted in 1948, during one of Matisse’s final bursts of easel work in Vence, the canvas belongs to a suite of large interiors executed between 1947 and 1948. In these works fidelity to optical fact yields to what the artist called “the magic of chromatic relationships”. A sibling version, now at the Museum of Modern Art, substitutes an ochre ground, demonstrating his concern with tonal permutations rather than descriptive veracity. Standing on the brink of the paper découpages, this picture condenses decades of inquiry into colour, ornament, and the luminous possibilities of domestic space, while offering a valedictory salute to the painterly surface before scissors and gouache would take centre stage.