Notre-Dame, one late afternoon

Henri Matisse's 'Notre-Dame, one Late Afternoon' (1902) is one of his early Paris subjects — the great cathedral viewed from near his studio on the Quai Saint-Michel, which gave him a direct view of the cathedral's south transept and the Île de la Cité. Matisse depicted Notre-Dame at different times of day and in different seasons, creating a modest series that paralleled Monet's cathedral series while developing in a very different direction. His late-afternoon treatment captured the specific quality of the declining day's warm light on the stone.

Matisse renders Notre-Dame in late afternoon light with his characteristic bold color and direct observation — the cathedral's stone facade lit by the warm declining sun, the shadows deepening in the crevices and recesses of the Gothic stonework, and the quality of the late afternoon Parisian atmosphere all depicted with a coloristic intensity that already moved beyond conventional Impressionist atmospheric dissolution toward the bolder color statement of his emerging mature style.