Boy with Butterfly Net

Painted in 1907 and held in the Minneapolis Institute of Art, 'Boy with Butterfly Net' is an unusual work in Matisse's output — a painting of a child in an outdoor setting that recalls Impressionist domestic scenes while simultaneously pushing toward the formal simplifications of his mature style. The subject of a child in a garden or outdoor space was a common one in late nineteenth-century painting, but Matisse treats it with the structural economy he was developing across all his work in 1907. This was the year he produced 'Blue Nude' and was exploring radical simplifications of the figure; the boy with a net offered a pretext for treating a figure in motion against a landscape background. The Minneapolis collection holds several Matisse works that document the range of his production beyond the large iconic canvases.

The figure of the child is rendered with the broadly simplified contour approach Matisse was developing in 1907, the body treated as a colour shape rather than an anatomically described form. The outdoor setting provides a warm, luminous backdrop.