MARGUERITE MATISSE: A Daughter's Courage in Occupied France
We know Marguerite Matisse first through the eyes of her father.
She appears in Henri Matisse’s work from childhood through middle age, more consistently than any of his other models. We see her with dark hair and a direct gaze, sometimes wearing a ribbon or a high collar around her neck. She can appear reserved, even severe. Because she is so familiar to us as a face in Matisse’s paintings, it is easy to think of her principally as his daughter and model.
Matisse with his wife Amelie and his daughter Marguerite
But Marguerite Matisse-Duthuit had another life, one that placed her in extraordinary danger. During the German occupation of France, she worked for the French Resistance. She was arrested by the Gestapo, imprisoned, interrogated, and tortured. She escaped while being transported to Germany.
Once I knew this, I could no longer look at Matisse’s portraits of her in quite the same way.
THE GIRL WITH THE RIBBON
Marguerite Émilienne Matisse was born in Paris on August 31, 1894. Her mother was Caroline Joblaud, one of Matisse’s models. Matisse legally recognized Marguerite as his daughter, and after he married Amélie Parayre, Marguerite was raised with their sons, Jean and Pierre.
When Marguerite was six, she contracted diphtheria and underwent an emergency tracheotomy. The operation saved her life but left her with a scar and years of continuing medical problems. In many of the portraits Matisse made of her, she wears a black ribbon or a high collar around her neck.
The ribbon became such a recognizable element in the paintings that it can seem almost formal: a dark line crossing the figure, holding the head in place, giving the portrait structure. But it was not simply a device the painter invented. It belonged to Marguerite’s body and to an illness she had survived.
Matisse painted and drew her repeatedly. The portraits change as his work changes. In some, her face is constructed with the heightened color of Fauvism. In others, it is reduced and reorganized into planes. At times she seems to have provided him with a face upon which he could test almost anything.
She was not, however, a passive model. Marguerite understood his work and was willing to tell him what she thought. She became his confidante, secretary, adviser, and intermediary with dealers and collectors. From the 1920s onward, she played an important role in administering and promoting his work.
She knew what it meant to be looked at, but she also knew how to look.
THE RESISTANCE
During World War II, the Matisse family was divided geographically but not entirely in its opposition to the occupation. Amélie Matisse joined the underground and worked as a typist for a clandestine publication. Marguerite entered the Resistance without telling her father.
Working under the name Jeannette, she became an agent de liaison—a liaison agent or courier—and was associated with the clandestine Front National and the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans. She transported messages and helped maintain the connections on which underground activity depended.
A courier might appear to be doing something ordinary: taking a train, walking through a town, carrying papers from one person to another. The effectiveness of the work depended upon its looking ordinary. Discovery could mean interrogation, torture, deportation, or death.
In the spring of 1944, Marguerite was betrayed and arrested by the Gestapo. She was imprisoned in Rennes and tortured. Amélie was also arrested for her Resistance activities, although the two women were not imprisoned together. Matisse, already ill and living in the South of France, could do nothing to help either of them.
Marguerite Matisse Duthuit and her brother Pierre Matisse stand in front of a painting by their father in 1970, at an exhibition in the Grand Palais in Paris.
Marguerite boarded a train bound for Germany. Accounts of the journey differ in some particulars, but the central fact is clear: the train was stopped near Belfort during an Allied air attack, and Marguerite escaped. She hid in the woods and was eventually taken in and protected by members of the Resistance.
Amélie survived six months in prison. Marguerite made her way back across France.
THE LAST PORTRAITS
In January 1945, Marguerite was reunited with her father in Vence. She had been separated from him for several years. Now she returned after imprisonment and torture, physically altered by what had happened to her.
Matisse drew her again.
The charcoal portraits he made in 1945 are among his last images of Marguerite. There is very little in them beyond the head, the face, and the dark movement of the charcoal. They do not illustrate what happened to her. They do not need to.
What interests me is the distance between these drawings and the early portraits of the girl with the ribbon. Matisse had drawn that ribbon over and over again: the visible evidence of the first time his daughter nearly died. Decades later, she returned to sit for him after surviving another encounter with death, this one deliberately inflicted.
He was once again looking at the daughter he had painted throughout his life. But she had lived through something he had not witnessed and could not fully know.
In 1923, long before the war, Marguerite had married Georges Duthuit, a writer, art critic, and historian. After the war, she resumed her work on behalf of her father. She helped scholars, worked with museums and collectors, and undertook the enormous task of cataloging his oeuvre. She was with Matisse when he died in 1954 and continued working on the catalog raisonné for the rest of her life.
Marguerite died of a heart attack in Paris on April 1, 1982. She was eighty-seven.
She spent much of her life preserving her father’s work. That work, in turn, preserved her face: as a child recovering from illness, a young woman, a daughter, a model, and finally a woman returned from the war.
The portraits allow us to see her. Her life requires us to look again.
IF YOU WANT TO KNOW MORE
Matisse and Marguerite: Through Her Father’s Eyes
The Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris brought together more than one hundred paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures, and ceramics for its 2025 exhibition devoted to Marguerite and her place in Matisse’s work.
Marguerite Duthuit-Matisse in the Spotlight
The Musée Matisse in Nice provides a concise account of Marguerite’s importance as a model, collaborator, keeper of her father’s legacy, and member of the Resistance.
Matisse’s Marguerite: Model Daughter
The Baltimore Museum of Art organized an exhibition devoted to the many portraits Matisse made of Marguerite and the changing ways in which he represented her.
Marguerite Matisse: La jeune fille au ruban, by Isabelle Monod-Fontaine and Hélène de Talhouët
Published in 2025, this is the first full biography of Marguerite. Its authors drew upon the Matisse archives and the correspondence between father and daughter.
Hilary Spurling, Matisse the Master: A Life of Henri Matisse, 1909–1954
Spurling’s biography provides an extensive account of the Matisse family during the occupation, including Marguerite and Amélie's Resistance activities.
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