Lydia Délectorsckaya

Lydia Nikolaevna Délectorskaya (23 June 1910 16 March 1998) was a Russian refugee and model best known for her collaboration with Henri Matisse from 1932 onwards.

Early life Born in the Siberian city of Tomsk, the only daughter of a pediatrician, Delectorskaya was orphaned at twelve, when both parents died in successive epidemics of typhus and cholera during the Civil War. Brought up by her aunt, they fled from the Russian Revolution of 1917 to Manchuria, China. Delectorskaya wanted to become a medical doctor, and was accepted in the medical faculty of the Sorbonne, but the high fees charged to foreign students were out of reach and she ended up a penniless exile in Nice.

Together they established a collaboration that gave her a new sense of power and purpose. Taking up the duties of studio manager and factotum along with being principal model, painting became central to her life as it was of Matisse’s.

Her close working partnership with Matisse drew an ultimatum from his wife of 40 years, "It's her, or me!" Her second book, Henri Matisse: Contre vents et marées (French Edition) 1996 (in English: Against Winds and Storms), is her carefully detailed and documented account of the years of Matisse's "second life" from the early 1940s.

Legacy Matisse gifted valuable paintings to Delectorskaya, providing for her future.

Exhibition

An exhibition dedicated to her was held at the Matisse Museum, a tribute to the model that accompanied the last decades of his life (Lydia Delectorskaya, Matisse's muse and model, Musée Matisse, Nice. 18 June – 27 September 2010.) Delectorskaya was blonde with fair skin and Matisse called her the "ice princess". There are more than 100 drawings and sketches for which Lydia modelled, and 90 paintings;