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- The Matisse Collection
- Cake Plate Set, La perruche et la sirène
$140
La Perruche et la sirène, 1952
Gouache on paper, cut and pasted, and charcoal on white paper
© 2025 Succession H. Matisse / Artist Rights Society (ARS) New York
About the Artwork
Henri Matisse began work on La Perruche et la sirène (The Parakeet and the Mermaid) in the spring of 1952. It is a massive, colorful piece of large-scale artwork measuring a towering 11 feet tall and 25 feet long. Meant to evoke a lively tropical garden, in the original piece, you can find the parakeet on the far left and the figure of the mermaid on the top right.
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About the Collection
When I founded East Fork 15 years ago it was a deliberate choice to leave Matisse out of the name. The legacy of my great-grandfather had followed me around for 20 years and I wanted out. I had a feeling that if I tucked myself away in the woods, something was going to emerge and it would free me.
As East Fork took shape and form, a peculiar thing began to happen: no one had any idea that below the colorful pots there was any connection at all to the stern and famous Frenchman on my father’s side of the family.
And so many years later, I slowly welcomed him back in. First with a vibrant red glaze that nodded to The Red Studio, and culminating now, with the collection before you. Through careful and meticulous collaboration with my brother at Les Héritiers Matisse, the company protecting the integrity of Matisse’s work, we worked to ensure our representations of Matisse’s art were in congruence with the originals, that the blue in the cut-outs was as close to the original gouache as could be, and every splatter of ink in the aquatints was captured. To accompany it, we developed La Sirène, a new blue that’s our own nod to the iconic color we worked so hard to capture in the artwork.This year much of his work enters the U.S. public domain, and this collection in part came to be as a way of marking that moment, and presenting it on our forms in as true and pure and unadulterated a way as possible.
