Although principally a painter, Matisse occasionally produced sculpture. This portrait of the model Henriette Darricarrère is the last and most abstracted in a series of three bronze heads produced between 1925 and 1929. It was cast in an edition of ten. A critic compared it with a mediaeval reliquary head: 'The object attains an autonomous status as a type of contemporary reliquary of modern art'.

Work not on display