These panels are the format Matisse himself favored. After hanging Kuba textiles across his studio walls, he wrote to his sister that he would look at them for long periods, waiting for something to come to him, and their patterns surface again in the paper cutouts of his final years, such as the 1951 Snow Flowers.
Woven from raffia palm fibers by the Kuba tribe of Central Africa, cloths like these served in dowries, and the largest were worn as festive dress at funerals. They are admired worldwide for the quality of both their design and their weaving. This set was made entirely by hand, with hand tools and painstaking precision, and no other like it exists.
