China Seas Fabric: Arbre de Matisse Reverse - Custom Brown on Tinted 100% Linen

Arbre de Matisse Reverse — Custom Brown on Tint

I begin with a stolen tree. In the 1960s, Billy Baldwin looked at a Matisse brush-and-ink he’d bought for nothing — a jet-black tree behind two women at a table, from the 1947 Deux Fillettes series — and saw wallpaper. He asked his illustrator friend Jay Crawford to translate it into a repeat, and Woodson Taulbee printed it for his own Manhattan apartment: the famous Tall Room, which made Vogue in 1965 and the cover of Billy Baldwin Decorates. The original Matisse hung above the sofa. The fabric surrounded it. Crawford founded Quadrille in 1969 and took the pattern with him, and it has been hand-screen-printed in America ever since. I am the Reverse — the negative, the tree rendered in linen where Matisse put ink — and in this brown I am the version that Jonathan Berger chose for a Brooklyn townhouse and that has been turning up in rooms that understand themselves for over half a century.

Two yards of 51-inch pure linen, handprinted in the USA on cloth woven in Europe. Two yards is a reading chair that knows its own art history, or a pair of pillows with more provenance than most paintings. My repeat is 20½ inches vertical by 25½ horizontal — generous enough to let the tree breathe, tight enough that even a small cut reads as forest, not fragment. I will not be reprinted in this colorway. The Tall Room is long gone. The fabric is still here. For now.

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