The woman who made hats, painted with one

The woman in the picture is Amélie Matisse, born Amélie Noélie Parayre (1872–1958), the painter’s wife. They had married in 1898, and for the rest of his early, hungry years she was his household manager, his business partner, and his model. There is a small, perfect irony folded into this particular painting, and it is worth slowing down to land it. Before she married Matisse, Amélie had worked as a milliner (a maker and seller of women’s hats), first in her aunt’s Paris boutique and then in her own hat shop on the rue de Châteaudun, which she ran from 1899 to 1902. So the woman in the most famous painting ever titled Woman with a Hat had herself made and sold hats for a living. That is not invented for the sake of a good line. It is in the record.

Matisse began the portrait around September 1905 and finished it in a rush, just before the Salon opened. He had been at work on a large, ambitious landscape; by the museum’s account he set that project aside to make this instead, a smaller, faster, riskier thing. It is not a grand machine of a painting. It is an ordinary easel portrait, a little over two and a half feet tall, the kind of size that hangs in a parlor. The scandal it caused had nothing to do with its scale. It had everything to do with its color.

Here is the technique, plainly. Matisse used pure, unmixed color, laid on in loose, visible strokes, leaving whole areas looking sketchy and half-done. And, crucially, he used what is called arbitrary color, color chosen for the effect he wanted rather than for what the eye actually saw. The opposite of arbitrary color is local color, the real color a thing has in daylight (grass is green, a brick is red, a cheek is pinkish). For four centuries European painters had treated local color as the floor under their feet. You could light it dramatically, you could push it warm or cool, but a face was still painted in the colors a face has. Matisse kicked that floor out. He painted Amélie’s face in greens and mauves and yellows that no face has ever worn, not to record her, but to make the picture do something.

There is a famous story about exactly this, and it deserves to be told the way it actually comes down to us, as a story. As the tale comes down from Matisse’s circle, studio colleagues looked at the riot of color in the picture and asked what color the dress and hat had really been. Matisse, exasperated, is said to have snapped “Black, of course”(or “Black, obviously”), as if the question missed the entire point. It is a charming line and probably true, but it is a reported studio anecdote passed down by people who knew him, not a thing anyone wrote down at the time, so hold it loosely. What it captures, though, is exactly right. The dress Amélie actually wore was a plain black one. The riot of color is pure invention. The painter was not telling you what she looked like. He was using her as the occasion for an argument about paint.