To mark the festive season in 1952, the Time Life Company commissioned Henri Matisse to create a stained-glass window for the celebrations at the Rockefeller Center. The artist made a maquette of cut-and-pasted paper for the work, in which a constellation of stars appears in the sky over a landscape of organic shapes. The Nuit de Noël (or ‘Christmas Eve’) artwork was handed over to the stained-glass craftsman who had made the windows at Matisse’s Chapelle du Rosaire in Vence. Many months later, the nearly 11 ft-high window was completed and sent to the Rockefeller Center in time for Christmas Eve.


Matisse described the maquette and the window as “like a musical score and its performance by an orchestra”. The soul stirring duo are now in the collection of MoMA New York and were exhibited in Tate Modern’s show, Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs in 2013, with the maquette even starring on then Tate director Nicholas Serota’s Christmas card that year. “Nuit de Noel is an astonishing creation celebrating the ‘joy of life’ by an artist in his eighties,” he said.

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