The Quest for Matisse

Sunday, October 08, 2006

The "four Henri's"


The above genealogy is Copyright 1998 by Hilary Spurling and used here under fair use provisions. Additionally, here is a quote from page 4 and one from page 5.
Page 4:
"His [artist] parents, who worked in Paris, were paying a New Year visit to their hometown. They called their first child Henri after his father, following a family tradition that went back four generations. The first Henri Matisse had been a linen-weaver in the nearby viallage of Montay in 1789... This ancestor, Henri Joseph Matisse, married a tanner's daughter from LeCateau ...
Henri Joseph's son, Jean Baptiste Henri, abandoned the humble weaver's trade to become a factory foreman in one of the mechanised wollen mills beginning to spring up in the town in the 1850's. His son in turn would leave home and abandon textiles all together.
This was Emile Hippolyte Henri Matisse, the painter's father, who found work in his twenties as a shop-boy in Paris."
Page 5:
"Hippolyte Henri's own parents had both died by the time he was twenty-five, leaving him with no immediate family except an elder sister married to a local weaver and a younger one working, like her sister-in-law, as a hat-maker in Paris."
So ... what do we make of this...

First, we see that although names were often hyphenated and extended, the tradition is that any one of these four Henri's could have been connected to Eugene. Unfortunately, it does not appear that it was Hippolyte Henri from that quote on page 5 (though that needs to be corroborated from another source).

Our next step in this journey is more books on Matisse and tracking down Eugene ...
The quest continues ... keep saying "correlate in space-time, correlate in space-time" and let's dig in ... ;^)

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