“What interests me most is neither still life nor landscape but the human figure. It is through it that I best succeed in expressing the nearly religious feeling that I have towards life. I do not insist upon the details of the face. I do not care to repeat them with anatomical exactness. Though I happen to have an Italian model whose appearance at first suggests nothing but a purely animal existence, yet I succeed in picking out among the lines of his face those which suggest that deep gravity which persists in every human being.”

— Henri Matisse

Source: 1900s, Notes d'un Peintre (Notes of a Painter) (1908), p. 413

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Henri Matisse 60

French artist 1869–1954

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Henri Matisse 60

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