Lydia Delectorskaya working in Matisse’s studio.
For our Matisse campaign, we were inspired by Lydia Delectorskaya, the woman who cared for Matisse until his death and who played a significant part in his artistic work and success later in Matisse’s life.
Their love was not an affair of the body but of the mind and heart. Orphaned at the age of twelve, Lydia fled to France to escape the revolution in Russia. Lydia eventually settled in Nice, where she got by as an artist's model, popular for her unusual blonde hair and striking blue eyes. In 1932, she found work in Matisse’s household, initially as a studio assistant and then as a domestic before finally standing in as his model three years later.
“One day, he sat down with a sketchbook under his arm and, while I was scarcely paying attention to the conversation, suddenly spoke to me, ‘Don’t move!’ … And soon, Matisse asked me to pose for him.”
She later became essential to his process. According to Matisse’s son Pierre, a successful art dealer in New York, his father had “renewed himself as a painter” with his first painting of Lydia, Pink Nude.
More than a model, Lydia was a creative partner to Matisse. She ran the studio, dealt with the dealers, organised the models, and handled all of the artist’s affairs with unimaginable precision. After his cancer diagnosis in 1941, it was Lydia who helped Matisse create his famous cutouts, as well as his work in the Chapelle du Rosaire de Vence. Matisse died in 1954, the day after making his last portrait of Lydia using a ballpoint pen.
“You want to know, whether I was Matisse’s ‘wife’. Both no and yes. In the material, physical sense of the word — no, but in the spiritual sense — even more than yes. For 20 years, I was ‘the light for his eyes’, and he was the only meaning of my life,” Lydia wrote of her relationship with the artist.
Lydia’s enthusiasm for art and refreshing disposition speaks beautifully to this collection’s celebration of la joie de l'été. As an ode to Lydia, we incorporated a light feel of artist and muse into our Matisse collection’s campaign.