China Seas Fabric: Arbre de Matisse Reverse - Custom China Blue on Tinted Belgian Linen / Cotton

Arbre de Matisse is one of those patterns that has crossed over from the trade into the broader visual vocabulary — you'll find it pinned, blogged, and photographed in enough shelter magazines to fill a small archive. There's a reason for that, and it isn't marketing. The design takes Matisse's late paper cut-outs — those radically simplified organic forms he made in Nice with painted paper and scissors when he could no longer hold a brush — and translates them into a tree-of-life repeat that somehow manages to feel both ancient and mid-century modern at the same time. The "Reverse" prints the tree and foliage as the positive image against an open ground, which gives the pattern more air and makes the branching structure legible as drawing rather than decoration. China Seas has been printing it for decades. It keeps selling because it keeps being right.

Two yards of a custom China Blue colorway on tinted Belgian linen-cotton is not a lot of fabric — but it's exactly enough for a pair of pillows, a French chair seat, or the panel on a small bench, and in a custom color you are not going to see recut. China blue on a tinted ground shifts this pattern from its more familiar navy-on-white crispness into something warmer and slightly older-looking, closer to the indigo-resist prints that European manufacturers were imitating from Indian originals three centuries ago. Hand screen-printed in the USA on European-woven ground, fifty-one inches wide. Two yards, then it's gone.

All quantities given in yards.

THIS IS A CUSTOM ITEM.  ALTHOUGH SIMILAR TO A STANDARD ITEM, THE COLOR AND GROUND ARE NOT THE SAME.

Please note that colors may not represent accurately in photo. Additional photo(s) provided to show scale, not colorway. All sales are final, and we do not send cuttings for approval.