‘Your muse or your wife’ is quite the ultimatum to throw at an artist. But that was the choice Henri Matisse faced in 1939 when his wife of 30 years (you might know her as ‘Woman with a Hat’, 1905) had had enough of Lydia Delectorskaya (‘The Pink Nude’, 1935).
It’s a dilemma which forms the crux of Sophie Haydock’s deliciously immersive novel about these two extraordinary women. A former journalist, Haydock is making it her mission to breathe life into women whose faces we know from famous artworks. Her gripping 2022 debut, The Flames, animated the tangled tales of the women who stripped naked for the troubled German artist Egon Schiele (including his sister and his sister-in-law).
Now she’s at it again with the more –superficially at least – mild-mannered Matisse. Think of her as the art world’s slightly spikier answer to Philippa Gregory, whose long sequence of historical novels sought the hearts of real women in the Tudor court. Only where Gregory, now 71, was once dismissed as a romantic novelist (mostly by those who didn’t read her), 42-year-old Haydock is lucky enough to be writing at a time when ‘herstories’ are given more respect.
I took Madame Matisse on a wet, grey holiday and it swept me into a world of startling, splashy colour. Having vaguely absorbed the idea of Matisse as Picasso’s gentler rival (he himself said he made work to soothe businessmen’s souls, while the Spaniard was confronting mankind with all its inhumanity), I enjoyed the corrective reminder of the seed merchant’s son’s middle-aged determination to épater les bourgeois. Amélie Matisse matched his bravery.
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