Effigiēs

08/16/2026

Henri Matisse
The three sisters
c.1916-17
oil on canvas

(*)This portrait of three sisters is one of Matisse’s master works. Three young brunettes are seated before a bistre background. Two of the young women look out at us while the last one is absorbed in her reading. The painter successfully creates a perfect balance between various seemingly incompatible elements: the different attitudes of the three sisters, the discordant colours, the impression of juxtaposition of several levels of perspective.
Multiple sources helped inspire this painting: Manet’s (1832-1883) painting, Japanese engraving and the painting Les dames de Gand [The Three Gand Ladies] which is conserved at the Louvre and at the time attributed to Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825), could have been inspirational for Matisse. At the time, Matisse’s interest in this subject was expressed many times and gave rise to different versions. As such, we know of three paintings that also depict three sisters, each time in different clothing and poses, conserved at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. That is probably where an explanation can be found for the painting’s presence at the Musée de l’Orangerie.
In fact, the art dealer Paul Guillaume contributed a great deal to the constitution of Doctor Barnes’ (1872-1951) collection and it is very likely that Matisse’s paintings representing the three sisters came through his gallery before arriving in the United States. It was one of the few works that Paul Guillaume bought at a public sale, certainly in memory of the paintings ceded to Doctor Barnes.

Provenance: Auguste Pellerin; vente Pellerin, 7 mai 1926, Paris n°66 (repr.); Paul Guillaume; Domenica Walter

(*) via Musée de l'Orangerie

07/08/2026

🖤

I can't hear it play fast no morePaces proxy for my patienceKee...

07/03/2026

The Day She Walked into S*X Wearing Gold Stilettos and Rewrote Fashion History
"Circa 1974, a young woman named Jordan walked through the door of 430 King's Road, London, wearing gold stilettos, a see-through net skirt, and a white bouffant that added a full foot to her already formidable presence, and in doing so she walked directly into the epicentre of what would become the most disruptive cultural moment Britain had seen since the Beatles, because that address was the boutique S*X, run by Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren, and it was not just a shop, it was a laboratory for subversion, a place where rubber fetishists and Teddy Boys had previously mingled alongside art school dropouts and music obsessives, and Jordan did not walk in as a customer looking to browse, she walked in as a force of nature looking to belong, and she did, immediately and completely, because Westwood and McLaren recognized in her something that money could not manufacture and marketing could not engineer, which was the authentic, uncompromising, fully realized vision of someone who had built their entire identity as a conscious act of artistic rebellion, and Jordan became the woman behind the counter at S*X, the terrifying and magnetic figure who greeted every curious visitor who dared come through that door, and the stories that emerged from that counter are extraordinary, Mick Jagger reportedly stood in the doorway once, looked inside, and turned back without entering, as if even he understood that the energy in that room was something he was not quite prepared for, and yet Jordan sat there every day, made it her cathedral, shaped the look and attitude of every young person who walked in and walked out changed, and she did it while commuting two full hours each way from Seaford on a train where strangers tried to throw her off carriages, day after day, because a girl with that much fire in her chest does not let a hostile commute dim the light, and Vivienne Westwood herself would later admit that Jordan's look was precisely what they had been searching for, the living proof that the clothes were not just garments but manifestos, and Jordan wore every single one like a declaration of war against mediocrity "

07/02/2026

07/02/2026

shot by Hannah Skye