Young Sailor I (1906)

A young man sits with one elbow lifted, his hand against the side of his head. A dark cap holds the upper edge of his face; his other arm drops towards a bent knee. Green trousers, a dark loose top and a wooden chair occupy most of the upright canvas. Around them, pale paint and open areas leave the figure's making unusually easy to see. Henri Matisse painted Young Sailor I at Collioure in 1906, then made a second version of the same subject. The Metropolitan Museum of Art's 2012 exhibition listed the first as an oil on canvas, 99.7 × 81.3 cm, then in the collection of Sheldon H. Solow. The museum's current account of the second canvas calls the first a private-collection work; the 2012 lender is not necessarily its present owner.^[1][2]

The first portrait is often introduced only as a step towards the more brightly simplified Young Sailor II. It deserves closer attention of its own. Matisse made a seated body that feels both solid and provisional: dark lines seize the pose, green and black strokes build clothing, and the lighter ground keeps reminding us that these decisions are painted on a surface. The second picture makes the comparison especially useful, but neither version needs to be called a failed attempt. They show the artist testing what a repeated subject could become.^[1]

Who is the young sailor?

The Met's exhibition account describes the model as a local teenager in Collioure, the fishing village on France's Mediterranean coast where Matisse was working. It says he is thought to have posed for just one day. The current Met record for the second portrait calls him a local sardine fisherman. Those are useful, modest facts: they connect the subject to the place and to a real person. They do not tell us his private thoughts, his precise working history, or what he felt about being painted twice.^[1][3]

The sitter's name appears in some retellings, including earlier accounts, but the consulted museum exhibition and object records do not establish it. This page therefore keeps to the identification those sources support. “Sailor” is the familiar painting title; the Met's description of a fisherman is more precise about the local occupation, though a cap or loose clothing alone would not prove it. Looking at the picture, what matters first is the relation between a recognisable young man and the lines through which Matisse constructed him.

The pose is compact. One leg bends across the lower right, while the other drops towards the bottom of the canvas. The raised elbow and hand at the cheek bring an upper diagonal back to the face. His torso fills much of the left half, pushing out towards the frame, whereas the chair and bent leg carry the image rightward. The eyes and mouth command attention because they are comparatively concentrated within the looser strokes of shirt and trousers. A viewer can read a pause in the pose, but cannot infer a particular mood or event from the expression alone.

How did Matisse build the first version?

The Met describes a visible process: Matisse marked the figure with thin, repeated pencil lines on canvas, traced them with black paint, and added loose strokes of strong colour. Parts of the canvas remain exposed; elsewhere thin paint ran down the surface. These details make the apparent roughness more informative than the word “unfinished.” They show how the sitter was placed, adjusted and made legible through contour, without proving that Matisse intended to cover every open area later.^[1]

Start at the cap. Dark paint secures its curved form and separates it from the pale space behind. The face beneath it has forceful brows, nose and mouth, but the edges of cheeks and hair do not have the same even finish as a conventional studio portrait. Move down to the top: short dark strokes and light interruptions make it read as clothing while allowing some of the ground to participate in the form. In the trousers, broader green fields are broken by angled marks at the knees and creases. Matisse has enough information to hold a seated body without describing every fold.

The chair is similarly economical. Its upright and crosspieces appear in warm, reddish-brown strokes; portions disappear behind the body. The eye supplies a piece of furniture from a few structural clues. The chair is important because it tells us how the youth's weight is supported, yet it does not become a carefully measured object. Its visible parts help organise the lower half of the canvas, especially where the leg bends and where the other drops out of view.

Across the background, pale blue, green, buff and warmer touches do not settle into a detailed room or view. They keep the figure in shallow space. The paint can appear sketchlike when viewed as a reproduction, but the Met's evidence of deliberate pencil blocking and black tracing argues against treating it as careless. A rapid-looking effect may still depend on close decisions about pose, border and intervals of bare canvas. The full work is an oil painting, not a preparatory drawing, even though drawing remains visible within its method.^[1][2]

What changed in Young Sailor II?

Matisse retained a recognisable pose for the second painting: a seated figure, cap, one elbow raised and hand near the head, the other arm and bent legs set around a chair. Yet the Met describes sharper contours, more clearly defined forms and large, mostly flat fields of blue, green and pink. The background becomes a nearly continuous pink plane instead of the varied pale space of the first canvas. The face is also more strongly transformed. The two pictures are closely related but look different almost immediately, even at thumbnail size.^[3]

The change is not merely a matter of adding paint. In the first version, dark strokes move irregularly through the top and trousers, so the body's form seems to emerge from successive marks. In the second, broad blue and green areas declare the clothing more firmly. The pink ground pushes against them as a chosen colour field. Matisse also enlarged and tightened aspects of the sitter's expression, turning a relatively observed face into a more assertive arrangement of eyes, mouth and contour. The Met connects the second canvas's pink ground to the colour of Van Gogh's L'Arlésienne, a painting that Matisse had earlier hoped to acquire.^[1][3]

Collector Leo Stein recalled Matisse showing him a study of the young fisherman and a freely transformed copy after returning to Paris. The Met cites this recollection to illuminate how the pair was understood at the time. It should be read as a witness's account rather than a rule requiring us to value only the second picture. The first's looser surface permits a particular kind of looking: we notice the hand's pressure near the face, the partly visible structure of the chair and the movement of dark paint through green fabric. The second version answers these elements with stronger simplification.^[1]

A later technical study examined Young Sailor II, not the private-collection first version. It found pencil drawing beneath thin paint in the Met's canvas and analysed its pigments. That research is valuable for understanding the second painting's deliberate construction. Its exact material findings cannot simply be assigned to the first, even when both appear to use drawing and thin layers. The same study describes the first as comparatively naturalistic and sketchy, with a striking colour range, and notes that the two versions were made within weeks of each other.^[4]

Does a separate drawing explain the two paintings?

The Met also owns a 1906 graphite Study for “Young Sailor”, catalogue number 1999.363.40. It is a separate work on paper, only 21.6 × 18.4 cm. Its title connects it to the sailor subject, but the current object entry does not specify a one-to-one preparation for the first painting alone. The drawing, the two canvases and their different methods should remain separate objects. What they show together is Matisse's interest in revisiting a pose rather than accepting a single representation as inevitable.^[5]

That interest can be seen without constructing an unsupported step-by-step sequence. The first painting gives us a clear seated arrangement with an unusually open surface. The second makes a new picture from a closely related arrangement. The graphite study confirms that drawing was part of the subject's orbit, but its presence does not prove that each stroke on the first canvas was transferred from that sheet. The Met's account of pencil directly on the first canvas is the more specific evidence for how this particular painted surface began.^[1]

For a final look at Young Sailor I, follow the raised arm down through the dark top, then across the green bent leg and the chair underneath. Return to the face and notice how concentrated it appears against the broken paint around it. The painting holds its model in place while allowing us to see the choices that built him there. The paintings directory sets this 1906 experiment among Matisse's other canvases; the second sailor page shows how radically a familiar pose could change when he reconsidered its lines and colour.