Notre-Dame, une fin d'après-midi
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Notre-Dame, une fin d'après-midi ("A Glimpse of Notre-Dame in the Late Afternoon") is a painting by Henri Matisse
Henri Matisse
Henri Matisse was a French artist, known for his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but is known primarily as a painter...

 from 1902. Its somber coloration is typical of Matisse's works executed between the end of 1901 and the end of 1903, a period of personal difficulties for the artist. This episode has been called Matisse's Dark Period.

Between 1896 and 1901, Matisse's painting had progressed from the subdued tones of his earliest works to an intense colorism that prefigured the Fauvism
Fauvism
Fauvism is the style of les Fauves , a short-lived and loose group of early twentieth-century Modern artists whose works emphasized painterly qualities and strong colour over the representational or realistic values retained by Impressionism...

 to come. In 1896 and 1897 he had traveled to Brittany
Brittany
Brittany is a cultural and administrative region in the north-west of France. Previously a kingdom and then a duchy, Brittany was united to the Kingdom of France in 1532 as a province. Brittany has also been referred to as Less, Lesser or Little Britain...

, where the Australian painter John Peter Russell
John Peter Russell
John Peter Russell was an Australian impressionist painter.-Life and work:John Peter Russell was born at the Sydney suburb of Darlinghurst, the eldest of four children of John Russell, a Scottish engineer, his wife Charlotte Elizabeth, née Nicholl, from London. J. P. Russell was a nephew of Sir...

 encouraged him to paint en plein air
En plein air
En plein air is a French expression which means "in the open air", and is particularly used to describe the act of painting outdoors.Artists have long painted outdoors, but in the mid-19th century working in natural light became particularly important to the Barbizon school and Impressionism...

. Through Russell he met Camille Pissarro
Camille Pissarro
Camille Pissarro was a French Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist painter born on the island of St Thomas . His importance resides in his contributions to both Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, as he was the only artist to exhibit in both forms...

, whose influence was decisive in making a colorist of Matisse. In 1898 he traveled to London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

, where he studied the works of J. M. W. Turner
J. M. W. Turner
Joseph Mallord William Turner RA was an English Romantic landscape painter, watercolourist and printmaker. Turner was considered a controversial figure in his day, but is now regarded as the artist who elevated landscape painting to an eminence rivalling history painting...

; then, after a year spent in Corsica
Corsica
Corsica is an island in the Mediterranean Sea. It is located west of Italy, southeast of the French mainland, and north of the island of Sardinia....

 and Toulouse
Toulouse
Toulouse is a city in the Haute-Garonne department in southwestern FranceIt lies on the banks of the River Garonne, 590 km away from Paris and half-way between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea...

, he returned to Paris, where the startling boldness of his work was admired by other young artists. His paintings found few buyers, however, and his wife, Amélie, had to open a dress shop to support their household.

In May 1902 a major financial scandal, the Humbert Affair
Thérèse Humbert
Thérèse Humbert was a French female fraudster, who pretended to be an heir of an imaginary American millionaire Robert Crawford.Humbert was born Thérèse Daurignac, a peasant girl in Aussonne, Languedoc, France. As a child, she once convinced her friends to pool their jewelry so that she could fool...

, unexpectedly ensnared Amélie's family. Her mother was the Humbert family's housekeeper, and both she and her husband became scapegoats in the scandal. As a result, Matisse was forced to spend much of his time during the next year dealing with lawyers and journalists. His studio was searched by detectives, and his wife's family was menaced by angry mobs of fraud victims. According to art historian Hilary Spurling
Hilary Spurling
Hilary Spurling, CBE, FRSL is a British writer, known as a journalist and biographer. She won the Whitbread Prize for the second volume of her biography of Henri Matisse in January 2006...

, "their public exposure, followed by the arrest of his father-in-law, left Matisse as the sole breadwinner for an extended family of seven. This is why he switched to painting canvases that were at least potentially saleable".

Inspired by Rodin
Auguste Rodin
François-Auguste-René Rodin , known as Auguste Rodin , was a French sculptor. Although Rodin is generally considered the progenitor of modern sculpture, he did not set out to rebel against the past...

 and Barye
Antoine-Louis Barye
Antoine-Louis Barye was a French sculptor most famous for his work as an animalier, a sculptor of animals.-Biography:Born in Paris, Barye began his career as a goldsmith, like many sculptors of the Romantic Period...

, Matisse struggled to master volume in sculpture as well as in painting. He darkened his palette, with the results seen in the present work, and in such paintings as Carmelina (1903, in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts, is one of the largest museums in the United States, attracting over one million visitors a year. It contains over 450,000 works of art, making it one of the most comprehensive collections in the Americas...

).

The medium is oil on paper mounted on canvas and it measures 72.5 × 54.5 cm (28½ × 21½ in). The painting is in the Albright-Knox Art Gallery
Albright-Knox Art Gallery
The Albright-Knox Art Gallery is an art museum located in Delaware Park in Buffalo, New York. The gallery is a major showplace for modern art and contemporary art. It is located directly across the street from Buffalo State College.-History:...

, Buffalo
Buffalo, New York
Buffalo is the second most populous city in the state of New York, after New York City. Located in Western New York on the eastern shores of Lake Erie and at the head of the Niagara River across from Fort Erie, Ontario, Buffalo is the seat of Erie County and the principal city of the...

, New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...

.
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