On the Road

“The pleasure [of motoring] is seeing Nature as I could in no other way see it; my car having ‘tops’, I get Nature framed —and picture after the other delights my artistic eye.” *

Henri Matisse is famous for his paintings of views through the windows of hotel rooms, studios, and houses. This is a landscape triptych through the windscreen of his car stopped at the side of the road in 1917. 

It’s the best known of a series of paintings Matisse made of landscapes seen through windshields.  We see the world as if from inside a goldfish bowl represented by glass sides of the car.

In another painting (left) Landscape through a Windshield, painted the same year, the upper half of the windshield is raised, a spatial disruption that reframes the scene  

At the time of these paintings, Matisse, his wife Amélie and his three children were living at Issy on the outskirts of Paris. His hometown, to the north, was occupied by the Germans and he was separated from his family trapped behind enemy lines.

That summer – 1917 –  Matisse purchased a 1911 Renault and his son Pierre drove him around.  At seventeen, Pierre was just a little younger than his brother Jean, who had recently been drafted into the French army. Father and son went on painting expeditions in the woodlands to the south and southeast of the city and along the banks of the Seine. From time to time, Matisse would ask his Pierre to stop the car so he could get out – or stay in – and paint.

The Windshield, On the Road to Villacoublay

According to Pierre, Matisse painted The Windshield, On the Road to Villacoublay, that summer of 1917. They were driving on the busy road road to the southwest of Paris and to the east of Versailles toward Villacoublay, a semi-military airport just outside of the city. It was around 5.00 in the evening and Matisse asked him to pull over so he could paint the view of the road from inside the car. The artist switched places with Pierre and painted with the canvas propped on the right-hand steering wheel.

It’s a  a panoramic view from three windows that includes the windshield with its two panes of glass, horizontally split by a faint black seam. The windshield and side windows of the car organize the visible world into discrete segments The landscape of fields, water and the road ahead are contained and framed by the artist in the driving seat. With the canvas propped on the steering wheel there’s a clear view through the horizontally-split glass of a flat windshield. 

The frame of the sketch corresponds to the windshield frame which in turn corresponds to the frame of the canvas. It’s the scene on the road but also a depiction of a painting in progress. It’s a meta painting, a picture within a picture, that turns the car into a metaphor for the painter’s vision. The car is the means to the view – the access – and is also the view itself. the painting is a pictorial suite of distinct but related images each framed by the structure of the car. 

Country views on both sides and the perspective of the road ahead lined by trees contrast with the manufactured inside and out of the car. On the interior there’s the spoked steering wheel, the rubber bulb of the horn, the window lifts. On the exterior mudguards, the curved hood, radiator cap, and headlamps.

By Car to the French Riviera

Matisse first went to Nice in December 1917. He had caught bronchitis visiting his son Jean who had been posted as an air mechanic to Istres airfield, thirty miles west of Marseilles. He drove along the coast to Nice where he hoped he could recover with a few days rest and clement weather. He arrived on Christmas Day and took a room overlooking the sea front in the Hotel du Beau Rivage, then a modest hotel, located on Quai du Midi (now Quai des Etats-Unis). The weather was cold and wet and gloomy.

But it shifted: 

“What made me stay are the great colored reflections of January, the luminosity of day-light.”

Many of the paintings of his years in Nice are the from hotel rooms with a view to the sea, paintings – still lifes, landscapes, interiors, and portraits  – inspired by the light and color of the French Riviera.

Antibes, Landscape from the Interior of an Automobile

In 1925, he again painted the view from the window of a car. He took his room-with-a view-on the road.  The car is a rolling room  from which to view the world. It is as if the car serves as a hotel room on wheels, a mobile studio that provided the contained and private space from which Matisse could observe and depict the world.

The waterside road at Antibes is not framed by the window or balcony of a hotel but by the windows and windshield of his car.