Young Sailor II (1906)

A seated young man fills nearly all of Henri Matisse's Young Sailor II. His cap cuts into a pink background; one elbow rises towards his face, while a broad blue top falls over green trousers. The hand resting near his knee seems unusually large. A wooden chair appears in pieces around him, and a patterned sock and shoe enliven the bottom edge. Matisse painted this 1906 oil on canvas at Collioure on the Mediterranean coast. It is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection, accession 1999.363.41, and measures 101.3 × 83 cm in the Met's current record.^[1]

The title's II matters. Matisse had already painted Young Sailor I, a separate canvas with the same sitter and a related pose. The first has broken, searching marks and a comparatively observed face. In this second painting, Matisse made the body more emphatic and the background more continuous. The Met calls the model a local sardine fisherman; its exhibition account describes a teenager believed to have posed for only one day. Those records give a place and a limited account of the sitter, while the painting gives us a portrait transformed by Matisse's choices.^[1][2]

What changed between the two sailor portraits?

The sitter's arrangement remains recognisable across the pair. He sits on a simple chair, bends his legs, lifts one arm and brings a hand towards his head. Yet the second canvas is not a tidied copy. The face becomes more angular and assertive, the torso grows into a large blue form, and the green of the trousers occupies broad areas. An almost unbroken pink field presses forward around the figure. The Met describes sharper contours and flatter colour in this version. Its exhibition account links the pink ground to the colour of Van Gogh's L'Arlésienne, a work Matisse had earlier tried to buy.^[1][2]

The difference is clearest at the face. In the first portrait, the young man's cheeks and expression sit within relatively loose, varied paint. Here dark arches and coloured strokes shape the eyes, nose and lips more strongly. The cap frames them like a second contour. We may read the expression as confident, guarded or theatrical, but none of those impressions proves what the sitter felt. The Met's current label offers a strongly characterful reading of the expression. The visible paint supports saying that Matisse altered its appearance; it does not turn the label's language into a biographical fact about the fisherman.^[1]

The blue top also changes the pose's weight. Instead of a cluster of loose dark marks, it forms one spreading mass from shoulder to shoulder and down to the waist. Violet and darker blue lines curve through it, keeping the garment from becoming a simple coloured shape. Its wide sleeve extends left towards the canvas edge. The raised elbow makes a large oval at the right, while the bent leg answers it below. These forms are exaggerated, yet the chair's posts, hand and knees still provide enough clues to locate the body in space.

The green trousers complete that balance. One thigh projects across the lower part of the painting; the other bends sharply on the right. Their strong colour holds the bottom of the figure against the pink field. The large hand near the knee has a practical compositional role: it connects blue sleeve, green leg and chair. Its scale may look odd beside the face, but reducing it to a mistake would miss how firmly it anchors the seated body. Matisse has chosen which bodily parts must register from a distance and which can remain abbreviated.

Is the painting as flat and simple as it looks?

At first sight, broad pink, blue and green areas make the work look direct. Close viewing reveals more decisions. Fine lines and changing tones model the cap. Violet outlines and short blue marks move across the top. Green fields in the trousers are worked with strokes that follow the bent legs. The Met's current account calls these large colour areas “mostly flat,” a useful description of their overall effect rather than a claim that each area is mechanically even.^[1]

A scientific study undertaken for MoMA's The Red Studio exhibition examined this very canvas. Researchers found that Matisse sketched the figure directly in pencil on a white prepared ground. Repeated fine lines blocked out the composition; thin oil paint allows some drawing and light ground to show through. The researchers found no substantial changes in the figure's initial drafting. That evidence gives the second version its own deliberate process, rather than treating it merely as a spontaneous colour experiment after the first.^[3]

Technical analysis also helps make the colours specific. The blue garment includes ultramarine, and the cap contains blue pigments; the green trousers contain a chromium-based pigment the researchers identify as probably viridian. The face is built from separate coloured strokes, including yellow and vermilion, with light mixtures for skin. The study describes fluid, thin paint and bristle marks that allow the white ground to participate in the figure. These are findings about Young Sailor II itself. They should not be assigned automatically to the privately held first version, even though the Met's exhibition describes drawing and thin colour there too.^[3][2]

The pink background is especially instructive. It appears as a single broad plane, but the researchers identified carmine lake with lead white in it. Its effect depends on its relation to the cooler garment and green trousers. The colour does not tell us what a Collioure wall actually looked like. It sets off the figure, closes down depth and makes the sitter's outline easy to follow. The Van Gogh comparison in the Met's exhibition account concerns Matisse's colour choice, not a claim that the two paintings depict the same place or person.^[3][2]

The chair and lower right offer a counterweight to those larger fields. Brown rails appear and disappear behind the sitter; the technical study found earth pigments and brighter touches in the chair. Below the bent knee, a checked sock and colourful shoe give the eye smaller patterns to discover. Their detail matters because the broad clothing might otherwise seem to flatten the whole image. Matisse can simplify a form and still sharpen another. The painting's surface keeps moving between large colour relations and small descriptive accents.^[3]

Why did Matisse paint the sitter twice?

The Met's 2012 exhibition described the second canvas as Matisse's reinterpretation of the first. Collector Leo Stein later recalled seeing a study of a fisherman and a freely altered copy when Matisse returned to Paris. His account is evidence that the pair's differences attracted attention early, but “study” and “copy” in that recollection need not settle the artistic status of either painting. They are two distinct oils, painted within weeks according to the later technical study. One shows a more open process; the other tests how far contour and colour can recast a familiar pose.^[2][3]

The Met also holds a 1906 graphite Study for “Young Sailor”, accession 1999.363.40. It is a small work on paper, distinct from both canvases. Its title establishes a relation to the subject, but the public object record does not assign every line to a particular stage of either painting. The pencil found by technical examination on Young Sailor II is drawing on that canvas, not evidence that the graphite sheet was mechanically transferred to it. Keeping these objects separate makes Matisse's repeated looking clearer.^[4][3]

This experiment belongs to the period in which Matisse was testing the expressive force of colour and simplified form. The sailor's costume can be read as blue, green and pink relations before it is read as a literal account of fabric. Yet the sitter remains present. A large hand weighs on a leg; the chair holds his body; the face looks out from beneath a cap. The painting works because it does both things at once. Its changes from the first version are visible without assuming that a reduced likeness means Matisse abandoned interest in the person.

How did the sailor enter The Red Studio?

About five years later, Matisse painted Young Sailor II among the works gathered in The Red Studio. MoMA's 2022 exhibition reunited that studio picture with surviving objects depicted inside it, including the Met sailor. It is a rare chance to compare an original painting with Matisse's later image of it. The 1906 portrait was no longer only an experiment made at Collioure; by 1911 it had become one of the works he chose to show in a painted account of his own practice.^[5][3]

The scientific study found that the studio picture's miniature sailor is broadly faithful to the larger work, while omitting facial features and the sock's checked pattern. Matisse also altered some pigments and colour relations in the smaller depiction. That should not surprise us: a portrait reproduced inside another painting has to work at a different scale and in a room dominated by red. The comparison shows that Matisse could revisit a completed image yet again, selecting what would remain legible and what could disappear.^[3]

Return to the 1906 canvas after that comparison. Start with the pink plane, follow the blue shoulder and curved sleeve, then let the green legs lead down to the chair and patterned sock. The face and hand pull the eye back towards the person sitting there. This route through the image helps explain why its apparent simplicity is so forceful: each large choice directs attention to another. The first sailor portrait shows the same subject before this emphatic recasting; the paintings directory places both works among Matisse's wider experiments with colour and figure.