I want, I shall have
Graham Robb
- La Grand Thérèse or The Greatest Swindle of the Century by Hilary Spurling
Profile, 128 pp, £7.99, September 1999, ISBN 1 86197 132 X
The role of Thérèse Humbert and her family in the life of Henri Matisse was one of the revelations of the first volume of Hilary Spurling’s pioneering biography: The Unknown Matisse. For more than twenty years, the Humberts were a major force in the social and political life of the Third Republic, until, in 1902, their legendary wealth was exposed as a hoax. The famous Humbert strongbox, which was supposed to contain a hundred million francs in bearer bonds, was found to be almost empty. Thousands of creditors and investors lost everything. The Humberts’ innocent steward, Armand Parayre, was arrested, along with the disgraced family. His son-in-law, ‘a dashing but penniless young artist’, was widely considered guilty by association, and ‘from 1905 onwards, Matisse’s work was regularly dismissed by the critics as an attempt to pull a fast one on the public’
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Vol. 22 No. 4 · 17 February 2000 » Graham Robb » I want, I shall have (print version)
pages 30-31 | 2609 words