Meet Marguerite, Henri Matisse’s Eldest Daughter—and One of His Most Influential Models
An exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris examines Marguerite’s indelible influence on her father’s evolving painting styles
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“This painting wants to take me somewhere else,” Henri Matisse once told his eldest daughter, Marguerite Duthuit-Matisse, as she was modeling for him. “Do you feel up to it?”
For Matisse, an artist who experimented across many styles, this was a common sentiment. But Marguerite was one of her father’s few constants, sitting for hundreds of his works, always willing to go wherever the art asked them to.
“Matisse and Marguerite: Through Her Father’s Eyes,” an exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris, assembles more than 110 works—paintings, prints, drawings and sculptures—in which Matisse gathered inspiration from his daughter.
While many of the works, especially the drawings, have never appeared in Matisse shows, organizers initially worried that an exhibition focusing on the artist’s portraits of one person would veer into tedium.
“But actually, Matisse renews himself so often,” Charlotte Barat-Mabille, the curator at the Musée d’Art Moderne, tells the Art Newspaper’s Dale Berning Sawa. While the model stays the same, the artworks shift from style to style. “It is sumptuous, varied, alive,” she adds.
Marguerite was born in 1894, the daughter of Matisse, then an unknown art student, and Caroline Joblaud, one of his models. Matisse and Joblaud never married, but he officially recognized his daughter when she was 3. After he married Amélie Parayre in 1898, the couple brought Marguerite into the family, alongside their sons Jean and Pierre.
“I adore Matisse. I love his work,” Barat-Mabille tells the Art Newspaper. “But what makes you love him even more is discovering him as a father, in what really was, for its time, a very modern family.”
Marguerite’s modeling work began early. Because of her frequent childhood illnesses, she didn’t attend school on a regular schedule. Instead, she spent time around her father’s studio. In his small studio companion, Matisse found “a patient, good-natured model, open to his most daring formal adventures,” per a statement from the Musée d’Art Moderne.
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Take Interior With a Young Girl (Girl Reading), which Matisse painted between 1905 and 1906. The subject is simple: Marguerite hunches over a book at a table. But Matisse’s brush offers a remarkably vivid depiction of such a quiet scene, boldly painting “in the vibrant, colourful style characteristic of Fauvism,” according to the statement.
In Marguerite Reading (1906), Matisse takes an almost identical scene—Marguerite reading at a table—but translates it into a radically different portrait of his daughter. The wild colors of Fauvism have subsided into pale blues, muddled whites and the red seen in Marguerite’s dress and hair ribbon.
Just four years later, Matisse offered another landmark depiction of his daughter, Marguerite With a Black Cat. She sits upright on a yellow chair with a candy-like green and pink background splitting the canvas in two. Unlike in portraits from her younger years, she is not bent over a book. Instead, she regards the painter and the viewer head-on.
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Matisse never wanted to sell this painting. “Like many artists, Matisse was well aware of the importance of certain paintings; he knew that it was one of the most beautiful portraits he had ever created and one of the most radical as well,” co-curator Isabelle Monod-Fontaine tells Observer’s Nadja Sayej.
His reluctance may also have been personal. As much as these portraits trace Matisse’s artistic development, they also outline his daughter’s life. In Marguerite With a Black Cat, as in many of her portraits, something—in this case a high collar—covers her throat. She’s concealing a scar from her first tracheotomy, performed after she fell ill with diphtheria at the age of 7.
Meanwhile, Matisse painted White and Pink Head (1914-15) during his “Cubism-adjacent phase,” as the Art Newspaper writes. The artwork shows how neither father nor daughter remained static in the painter-model relationship. She joined him on this new stylistic adventure during the dark years of World War I and seemed to challenge him into experimenting with new meanings and forms.
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After Marguerite married the art critic Georges Duthuit in 1923, she rarely appeared in her father’s paintings. She dabbled in painting and started a career in fashion design, forging her own path in the art world. At an exhibition in 1926, a critic lauded her work for “its strong and personal directions that allow her to successfully shoulder the heaviest of legacies,” per the exhibition guide.
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Some of Matisse’s final depictions of his beloved daughter come from 1945. During World War II, Marguerite joined the French resistance and was imprisoned and tortured by the Gestapo. While en route to a prison in Germany, she escaped and reunited with her father in the small French village of Vence. Overwhelmed by her story, Matisse drew two charcoal portraits of Marguerite. They are simple and poignant—a few lines conveying all that she had to share.
Matisse died nine years later, with Marguerite by his side. She spent the rest of her life promoting his legacy, taking a leading role in exhibitions, catalogs and sales.
As Matisse’s work enters the public domain this year, adorning more phone cases and scarves than ever before, Marguerite, who died in 1982, commands a quieter legacy. But, as the exhibition proves, she is vital to understanding his art.
“Far from passively letting herself be painted or drawn, Marguerite held up a kind of mirror to Matisse,” according to the exhibition guide. “The artist recognized himself in her, just as he came up against an implacable and fascinating otherness, peering at his daughter with the same concerned rigor that he applied to himself.”
“Matisse and Marguerite: Through Her Father’s Eyes” is on view at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris through August 24, 2025.
