Book Review | Madame Matisse by Sophie Haydock #booksky #MadameMatisse

Madame Matisse by Sophie Haydock is her follow-up novel after The Flames, about Egon Schiele’s mistresses. Here the author examines the women who surrounded Henri Matisse. Thank you to the publishers for the chance of the ARC via Netgalley. The book is published on Thursday.

Madame Matisse

by Sophie Haydock

This is the story of three women – one an orphan and refugee who finds a place in the studio of a famous French artist, the other a wife and mother who has stood by her husband for nearly forty years. The third is his daughter, caught in the crossfire between her mother and a father she adores.

Amelie is first drawn to Henri Matisse as a way of escaping the conventional life expected of her. A free spirit, she sees in this budding young artist a glorious future for them both. Ambitious and driven, she gives everything for her husband’s art, ploughing her own desires, her time, her money into sustaining them both, even through years of struggle and disappointment.

Lydia Delectorskaya is a young Russian emigree, who fled her homeland following the death of her mother. After a fractured childhood, she is trying to make a place for herself on France’s golden Riviera, amid the artists, film stars and dazzling elite. Eventually she finds employment with the Matisse family. From this point on, their lives are set on a collision course….

Marguerite is Matisse’s eldest daughter. When the life of her family implodes, she must find her own way to make her mark and to navigate divided loyalties.

Based on a true story, Madame Matisse is a stunning novel about drama and betrayal; emotion and sex; glamour and tragedy, all set in the hotbed of the 1930s art movement in France. In art, as in life, this a time when the rules were made to be broken… (goodreads)

My Review

I’d forgotten the blurb, since I got the ARC well before Christmas. So after Amelie delivered her ultimatum to her husband, I was rooting for her and agog for the next step. But we started a new section, going to find Lydia as a child in Russia. I was so bereft, I left it, and read the Clockmaker’s Daughter instead. This was probably a good thing, as I returned to Madame Matisse with an open mind.

Like her previous novel, The Flames, Sophie Haydock leaves no stone unturned in her search for credible background material to create the lives of women, in this case, of the early twentieth century (mostly).

And what she creates is an epic tale, not only of changing artistic styles, and the difficulties of the avant garde movements in gaining acceptance, but of the unsung women. They would have liked their own careers, whether in art, fashion, medicine or science. It’s a familiar enough tale. I think we are mostly aware of the barriers to education and professions that our foremothers had to batter. But tie that in with family bankruptcy due to systemic fraud, and with revolution sending you on a ten day journey by train to China, and thence to France some years later… and then World War 2 comes along.

The scope of this book is terrific. The writing is superb. The characters are totally, utterly believable, with all their biases and peccadilloes.

I dithered for a second before awarding it five stars, mainly because of my need to stop reading between one woman’s story and the rest. But that’s my fault, not the book’s.

Once again, Sophie Haydock claims the lead in my Book of the Year listing. I loved it, and so will you.