The window that never closed

The most important thing about Open Window, Collioure is not what happened to the object afterward, but what happened to the subject. The open window turned out to be the one motif Matisse came back to, again and again, for the rest of his long working life. He painted windows in Paris, then in Nice on the south coast and at Étretat on the Channel, on into the late 1940s. The window, the threshold where an interior meets the world outside, became his lifelong subject and, in a way, his lifelong metaphor for what a painting even is: a frame opening onto color. This small 1905 canvas is the early, foundational statement of that idea. It is where the window first swings open.

The painting’s life as an object, its provenance (the documented chain of who owned a work of art, from the painter’s hand to where it hangs now), is short and a little hazy in the middle, and worth getting exactly right because the easy version is wrong. It did not go straight from Matisse into a great museum. The first hands in the National Gallery’s chain are a Paris dealer, the Galerie Druet; from there, in 1906, the year after the Salon, it went to a collector in Le Havre named Pieter Van der Velde. Sometime around 1915–1918 it was, in the National Gallery’s own carefully hedged words, probably given to Van der Velde’s son-in-law, a General Réquin. (When a museum says “probably,” keep the “probably.” The record genuinely isn’t certain here.)

By 1949 it had surfaced in a Paris private collection. In 1952 two New York dealers, the Carstairs Gallery and the Sidney Janis Gallery, bought it jointly, and on 6 August 1952 they sold it to Mr. and Mrs. John Hay Whitney. (John Hay Whitney, 1904–1982, was an American businessman, collector and diplomat; his wife was Betsey Cushing Whitney, 1908–1998.) Note what that 1952 line tells you: the Whitneys bought it from dealers, not from the artist. No dollar prices survive in the public record for any of these sales, in 1906, 1949, or 1952, so there are no figures to give, and inventing one would be worse than leaving the blank.

Then, in 1998, the painting came to rest. The estate of Mrs. John Hay Whitney bequeathed it, with the rest of the Whitneys’ collection, to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. (accession number 1998.74.7), where it hangs today under the credit line “Collection of Mr. and Mrs. John Hay Whitney.” A small, vertical, under-two-feet canvas of a window thrown open onto a Mediterranean fishing harbor, painted in a single summer in colors no harbor ever wore, that helped earn a roomful of painters the name wild beasts, now hangs quietly on a wall in Washington with the window still open.