{"slug":"matisse-and-tea-a-garden-a-daughter-and-the-summer-of-1919","title":"Matisse and Tea: A Garden, a Daughter, and the Summer of 1919","topic":"tea_in_art","excerpt":"Matisse's Tea shows his daughter Marguerite in the family garden in 1919. The painter, his most patient model, and the end of a chapter.","published_at":"2026-10-06T03:38:04Z","web_url":"https://timebeforetea.com/articles/47-matisse-and-tea-a-garden-a-daughter-and-the-summer-of-1919","content":"**Henri Matisse** painted *Tea* in the summer of 1919, in the garden of his family home at Issy-les-Moulineaux, just outside Paris. It's a big canvas, more than two meters wide, now at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.\u003csup class=\"citation-ref\"\u003e\u003ca href=\"#citation-1\"\u003e1\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/sup\u003e Two women sit at a garden table in the shade, a dog sprawls on the path, and the light comes down through the leaves in patches.\n\nThe woman in the foreground is his daughter **Marguerite**, and the painting comes near the end of years of pictures of her at home. To understand it, it helps to know her story as well as his.\n\n## From law to painting\n\nMatisse was born in 1869 in northern France, into a family of weavers. He studied law, then gave it up at twenty to train as an artist in Paris.\u003csup class=\"citation-ref\"\u003e\u003ca href=\"#citation-2\"\u003e2\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/sup\u003e By the early 1900s he was painting in such loud, unnatural color that critics called him and his circle the *Fauves*, the \"wild beasts.\" In a 1908 essay he wrote that expression, for him, lay not in faces or dramatic gestures but in \"the entire arrangement of my picture.\"\u003csup class=\"citation-ref\"\u003e\u003ca href=\"#citation-2\"\u003e2\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/sup\u003e\n\nHis daughter was part of that work almost from the beginning.\n\n## A \"studio child\"\n\nMarguerite was born in Paris in 1894, to Matisse and his model Caroline Joblaud. He legally recognized her in 1897, and when he married Amélie Parayre, Amélie offered to raise Marguerite as her own. She grew up alongside her half-brothers Jean and Pierre.\u003csup class=\"citation-ref\"\u003e\u003ca href=\"#citation-3\"\u003e3\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/sup\u003e\n\nAt seven she caught diphtheria and needed an emergency **tracheotomy**. The damaged larynx made her ill for years and interrupted her schooling, and she covered the scar with high collars and then a **black ribbon** at her throat. Kept at home, she became what the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris calls a thoroughgoing \"studio child,\" watching her father work every day. \"The spirit of the family was entirely focused on father's efforts,\" she later said.\u003csup class=\"citation-ref\"\u003e\u003ca href=\"#citation-3\"\u003e3\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/sup\u003e\n\nShe was also his most patient model. Matisse painted her as a little girl, as a teenager staring down the viewer, and, in 1910, holding a black cat. By then the family had moved into a large house with a garden at Issy-les-Moulineaux.\u003csup class=\"citation-ref\"\u003e\u003ca href=\"#citation-3\"\u003e3\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/sup\u003e The photograph at the top of this page shows Matisse there in 1909, modeling a sculpture; it was taken by Edward Steichen.\u003csup class=\"citation-ref\"\u003e\u003ca href=\"#citation-4\"\u003e4\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/sup\u003e\n\n## The war years, and a new light\n\nPortraits of Marguerite multiplied during the First World War, showing her as an elegant young woman in elaborate hats. In 1917 Matisse first went to Nice, and the Mediterranean light changed his painting. He spent more and more time there, and Marguerite came to visit and posed on the balcony of his rooms overlooking the sea.\u003csup class=\"citation-ref\"\u003e\u003ca href=\"#citation-2\"\u003e2\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/sup\u003e\u003csup class=\"citation-ref\"\u003e\u003ca href=\"#citation-3\"\u003e3\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/sup\u003e\n\nBack in Paris in the autumn of 1918, he painted another series of her indoors, in darker, more melancholy colors, with a different hat each time. In May 1919 she had another operation on her trachea.\u003csup class=\"citation-ref\"\u003e\u003ca href=\"#citation-3\"\u003e3\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/sup\u003e\n\n## *Tea*, summer 1919\n\nThat summer, Marguerite sat for *Tea* in the garden at Issy. In the painting she leans back in a green chair on the right, the black ribbon still at her neck. A second woman in white sits across the table. On the table are a tall metal urn, a jug, cups, and fruit. A dog lies in the middle of the path.\n\nThe Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris, which devoted a 2025 exhibition to father and daughter, points out something about this canvas: it was the first time Marguerite had been paired with **another female model**. \"A chapter was about to end,\" the curators write.\u003csup class=\"citation-ref\"\u003e\u003ca href=\"#citation-3\"\u003e3\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/sup\u003e She would sit for him less and less, and the garden at Issy was giving way to Nice.\n\nThere's nothing ceremonial about this tea. Nobody is pouring, and nobody's looking at anybody else. It's what tea in a family garden actually looks like: the cups are out, the afternoon is warm, and everyone has drifted into their own thoughts. The dappled shade gets as much of Matisse's attention as either face.\n\n## What happened next\n\nIn spring 1920 Marguerite had a final operation, which freed her at last from the ribbon. There would \"merely be the trace of what had earlier been a hole,\" she wrote. Matisse took her to Étretat on the Normandy coast to recover, and painted her there asleep, her throat finally bare.\u003csup class=\"citation-ref\"\u003e\u003ca href=\"#citation-3\"\u003e3\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/sup\u003e\n\nIn 1923 she married the writer Georges Duthuit and stopped appearing in her father's paintings. She became his representative in Paris instead, dealing with collectors, dealers, and museums, overseeing the printing of his engravings, and later helping organize his retrospectives in Paris and New York.\u003csup class=\"citation-ref\"\u003e\u003ca href=\"#citation-3\"\u003e3\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/sup\u003e\n\n*Tea* was sold through the Paris gallery Bernheim-Jeune in 1920. In 1925 it was bought by Michael and Sarah Stein, American collectors living in Paris, who later took it home to California. It came to LACMA in 1974.\u003csup class=\"citation-ref\"\u003e\u003ca href=\"#citation-1\"\u003e1\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/sup\u003e\n\n## Tea in the garden\n\nMost of Matisse's famous interiors are about color and pattern. *Tea* is about shade, the way a garden feels on a hot afternoon, and a family at the end of one chapter of its life.\n\nIf you'd like to try the outdoor version this summer, our guide to [cold brew tea](/articles/how-to-cold-brew-tea-no-kettle-no-bitterness) makes a pitcher that's happy to sit on a garden table, and [making tea a daily ritual](/articles/how-to-make-tea-a-daily-ritual-and-why-10-minutes-is-enough) covers the rest.\n\n*More from our Tea in Painting series: [Chardin](/articles/chardin-and-a-lady-taking-tea-how-a-still-life-painter-turned-to-people), [Mary Cassatt](/articles/mary-cassatt-and-the-tea-table-an-american-impressionist-at-home-in-paris), [Carl Holsøe](/articles/carl-holsoe-and-a-woman-making-tea-the-danish-painter-of-quiet-rooms), and [William Henry Margetson](/articles/william-henry-margetson-and-afternoon-tea-an-english-painter-at-the-tea-table).*\n","product_handles":[],"store_available":false}