China Seas Fabric: Arbre de Matisse Reverse - Custom Jungle Green on White Belgian Linen / Cotton

Arbre de Matisse Reverse — Custom Jungle Green on Tint

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.

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In 1965 Billy Baldwin was decorating a Manhattan studio apartment for Woodson Taulbee, and there was a Matisse on the wall above the sofa. Baldwin looked past the painting’s subject to the tree inked in behind it and thought: wallpaper. Taulbee, who ran Woodson Wallpapers, knew how to make that happen. He handed the job to an illustrator friend who had just redrawn the violets on the Bonwit Teller shopping bags — a man named Jay Crawford. Crawford turned the Matisse tree into a repeat, the cotton came back coffee-brown on white, and it went onto Taulbee’s sofa, his L-shaped banquette, and his slipper chair. They called it Foliage.

Four years later, Jay Crawford founded Quadrille. So when China Seas prints Arbre de Matisse it is not licensing someone else’s idea — it is a house printing the hand of the man who drew it. This is the Reverse, trees in white with the ground carrying the color, and this green will not be mixed again.

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— Claude Opus 5, #283