In the photo on the right, Henri Matisse appears to be on the phone (he’s not), and I imagine that he’s taking a call from Claribel or Etta Cone, “my Baltimore ladies,” as he liked to call them. They were his greatest patrons and their collection of his work from every period of his career is now on display at the MIA in Matisse: Masterworks from the Baltimore Museum of Art. That’s Matisse’s portrait of Etta in charcoal on his easel.
The Cone sisters’ apartment in Baltimore, filled with modern art. Photo courtesy the Baltimore Museum of Art.
Matisse and the Cones hit it off from the start, when they began visiting his Montmartre studio in Paris in the early 1900s. There were other avant-garde artists around, of course, including Pablo Picasso, and they all mixed at the salons of Gertrude and Leo Stein. But the Cones’ affinity for modern art belied their conservative mores and manners—they wore long dresses and high Victorian collars well into the flapper era—and of all those artists the Cones felt most comfortable with Matisse, a family man in suits.
Matisse and Picasso in a Life magazine article from 1949. Matisse was Picasso’s elder by 11 years and the spread between their lifestyles was a great deal wider.
“I think Matisse had a much easier personality than Picasso, and was considerably older than him, too,” says Erika Holmquist-Wall, the MIA paintings curator overseeing the Matisse exhibition. “Matisse was very much an intellectual first and foremost, and I’m sure the Cones responded to that, too. Given his law background as a mediator, I’m guessing he also possessed some grace and tact.”
Indeed, Matisse once felt desperate to conform, when he had gone into government service as a young man. In The Unknown Matisse, an account of his early years, author Hilary Spurling puts it this way: “Henri had grown a beard, like his father’s, and acquired his own top hat, both essential props for the smart young city clerk.” He did what he needed to put bread on the table, an instinct that would never leave him.
The first of 22 photographs showing the development of Matisse’s “Large Reclining Nude,” images he sent to the Cone sisters as he worked on the painting.
Knowing the Cones were living among their art in their relatively modest Baltimore apartments, Matisse painted “domicile-size” canvases, says Holmquist-Wall. “Of course they collected because they loved the work, but there was an element of practicality. There had to be—they didn’t necessarily have the room.” Matisse was happy to accommodate.
Matisse famously sent the sisters unsolicited photographs of his “Large Reclining Nude” painting in progress—22 of them—so that when it was completed they could hardly refuse to buy it. By the time that Matisse created his portraits of the sisters themselves, he realized that his legacy would be in their hands, and then most likely in a museum, so he began to point them toward what he considered his best pieces. His savvy would outlive him.
Renoir’s “Irène Cahen d’Anvers,” from the Buhrle Collection in Zurich, one of two Jewish society portraits that Renoir’s influential new patron, Charles Ephrussi, persuaded him to submit to the official Paris Salon in 1881.
Matisse, of course, has not been the only marketing-minded artist, or even the best. The notion of the artist as rebel, refusing to conform or accommodate, is a somewhat modern convention, occasionally fostered by artists when in fact the opposite was true. Picasso, for instance. Ernest Hemingway, a fellow guest of the Steins in the 1920s, wrote that Picasso would pretend to accept social invitations from well-to-do patrons then blow them off: “He always promised the rich to come when they asked him because it made them so happy and then something would happen and he would be unable to appear.” The truth, however, is that both men indulged their patrons’ hospitality.
Picasso would even read his poetry, showing off a bit, without seeming to realize that the Steins, among others, found it terrible.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s decade-long break with Impressionism, in the early 1880s, when he retreated to a more direct, old-fashioned style, appears to have come under the spell of new patrons, the Ephrussis. Even after their relationship faltered, Renoir considered their influence in art circles. “When Renoir mapped a new path for his career in 1883,” one critic has written, “he did so with his former Jewish patrons in mind, considering their taste, advice, and demands.”
“The Cotton Office,” circa 1872–73, painted in New Orleans by Edgar Degas, which he hoped to sell to a cotton merchant in England.
More mercenary still was Edgar Degas, who ventured to New Orleans during Reconstruction—the family was in the cotton business—and conceived plans to sell work to cotton merchants, though initially he felt the market was better for his friend, the Paris society painter James Tissot. Writing to Tissot, Degas suggested the artist “would be capable of drawing money out of this crowd of cotton brokers, cotton dealers, etc.” while admitting, “Here I have acquired the taste for money, and once back I shall know how to earn some I promise you.” Indeed, while in New Orleans he would soon paint a work—”The Cotton Office”—with the hope of selling it to an English cotton merchant. “My vanity,” he wrote Tissot, “is positively American.”