Woman on a High Stool (Germaine Raynal)

Woman on a High Stool (Germaine Raynal) by Henri Matisse is a significant oil on canvas painting created in 1914. This French masterwork captures a moment during Matisse’s highly experimental period while he was working from his studio at the specific location of Paris, quai Saint-Michel, early 1914. The subject, Germaine Raynal, the wife of art critic Maurice Raynal, is rendered with a powerful formal austerity that signals a critical shift in the artist’s approach to portraiture and design.

The composition is marked by a severe simplification of form, moving away from the expressive Fauvism of the preceding decade toward a more rigorous, structure-driven pictorial space. Matisse uses broad, flat areas of color, allowing the application of the oil on canvas to emphasize geometry and planar recession over naturalistic depiction. The figure is positioned centrally on the high stool, asserting a vertical dominance that interacts dynamically with the sharp, abstract angles defining the surrounding environment. This piece demonstrates Matisse's ongoing exploration of the relationship between line and volume, pushing the limits of representation and abstraction simultaneously as modernism accelerated.

Completed just prior to the outbreak of World War I, this work reflects the intellectual rigor of the Parisian art scene, where Matisse was engaging deeply with issues of pictorial structure while maintaining his singular focus on the organization of color. This powerful example of French modernism is housed within the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. While the original Woman on a High Stool (Germaine Raynal) remains an indispensable part of MoMA’s holdings, the wide availability of high-quality prints ensures that the visual impact of Matisse's 1914 innovation is broadly accessible to scholars and the public domain.