China Seas Fabric: Arbre De Matisse Reverse - Custom Blue on White Suncloth (OUTDOOR)

There is a reason Arbre de Matisse has outlasted nearly everything else in the China Seas catalog. The design does something that sounds simple and isn't: it takes the flat, fearless paper cut-outs Matisse made at the end of his life — when he traded brushes for painted paper and scissors and called it painting with scissors — and arranges them into a tree-of-life that feels both ancient and completely modern. The branches don't taper politely. The leaves don't behave. The whole composition has the quality of something made fast and right by someone who had stopped second-guessing decades ago.

This is the Reverse printing — the foliage reads as the positive image against an open white ground, which lets the tree breathe and gives each leaf its own silhouette. Custom blue on white is the colorway that comes closest to the Matisse originals, which were often blue gouache on white paper, pinned to the walls of his studio in Nice. Fourteen yards on Suncloth — a hundred-percent acrylic, hand screen-printed in the USA on American-woven ground — means this goes where linen-cotton can't: poolside, covered porch, anywhere sun and salt air would punish a natural fiber. The pattern doesn't know the difference. It looks the same whether it's on a terrace in Palm Beach or a living room on the Upper East Side, which is more or less the point.

Suncloth is a synthetic fabric designed for more rugged use.  However, continuous exposure to salt or chorinated water or to extreme outdoor conditions may cause fading.

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.