Paysage (Barque et voiliers près de la côte)

Inscriptions: Signed (lower right)

Collection: Lenoir and Associates, Inc., San Antonio, Texas

Provenance: Lenora and Walter F. Brown, San Antonio,
Texas

Literature: Joann Moser, Daniel Robbins, Jean Metzinger in Retrospect, 1985, catalogue no. 7, p. 37 (titled Paysage, and dated circa 1906)

Notes: Possibly painted the same year as Luxe, Calme, et Volupté by Matisse, Paysage is a structurally sound, luminous work, consistent with what one would expect of an early 20th century painting by an artist interested in novelty. Despite the airiness of the scene, the small squares of pigment are extremely compressed: together containing a great deal of information. Like musical notation, Metzinger’s color notation has a strict syntax (which to an extent varied from one painting to another between 1903 and 1905) and encodes information that would be difficult to plot in any other way (e.g. wind direction, light source, time of day, location).