Matisse’s muse: new exhibition dedicated to the illegitimate daughter he spent a lifetime painting | Henri Matisse

Throughout his career, Henri Matisse would return repeatedly to paint his favourite model: his illegitimate daughter, Marguerite.

In what is considered his most famous portrait, she is depicted holding a black cat. In others, she is reading, relaxing and sleeping, most often with a high-neck blouse, a ribbon or a scarf covering a tracheotomy scar.

While her face is familiar, little else is known of the artist’s eldest child. Despite her fragile health, Marguerite joined the French resistance, was tortured by the Gestapo, faced deportation to a Nazi concentration camp, and remained a discreet and comforting presence in Matisse’s life until the day he died in November 1954, aged 84.

An exhibition opening in April at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris will bring together more than 110 works – paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures and ceramics – featuring Marguerite, many from private collections and never before seen in public in France. “We think we know all there is to know about Matisse, but here we have an image of him that is completely unknown to the public,” Charlotte Barat-Mabille, one of the exhibition curators, told the Observer.

“And while Marguerite’s face is very familiar around the world from Matisse’s portraits of her, apart from art experts and historians, very few people know much about her.”

Henri Matisse, the son of a wealthy grain merchant from northern France, was working as a court administrator in Paris when he was confined to bed after an attack of appendicitis at the age of 20. To combat the boredom, his mother bought him art supplies and he discovered what he called “a kind of paradise” in art, much to his father’s deep disappointment.

Marguerite was born in 1894 during the painter’s relationship with one of his models, Caroline Joblau, when he was in Paris studying art. Unusually for the time, Matisse recognised the child when the couple split. Four years later, when he married Amélie Noellie Parayre, he brought Marguerite to live with his new family, where she was brought up with two half-brothers, Jean and Pierre.

At the age of six, Marguerite contracted diphtheria and had an emergency tracheotomy. The damage to her larynx caused pain and discomfort for the next 20 years, interrupting her schooling and leaving her confined to home, where she spent hours with her father in his studio.

Matisse’s portraits from this time show Marguerite wearing a black ribbon or high-neck blouses to cover the scar. The most familiar of these is Marguerite with a Black Cat, completed in 1910, and hailed as bold and radical when exhibited in Berlin and New York. Matisse preferred to keep the work rather than sell it.

Matisse’s paintings and drawings of his daughter proliferated during the first world war and portray an elegant young woman, stylishly dressed and wearing elaborate hats. In 1920, Marguerite, then aged 26, underwent a final, painful operation to repair the scar on her neck and was subsequently painted without any accessories.

Three years later, Marguerite married the writer and art critic Georges Duthuit. Although she had taken up painting and succeeded in being included in group exhibitions during the war, she stopped producing her own work in 1925, and devoted herself to being Matisse’s assistant and agent, meticulously overseeing the printing of his engravings, supervising exhibitions, cataloguing his work and dealing with demands for it.

“As Matisse’s daughter, she was brought up with painting and it was natural to her. However, being Matisse’s daughter wasn’t easy, and although she had a natural talent and a good eye, she gave it up,” Barat-Mabille said.

As well as five of Marguerite’s works, the exhibition will include extracts from some of the thousands of letters the pair exchanged when Matisse was living in Nice and his daughter in Paris. “They wrote to each other almost daily, mostly about the banalities of daily life, but through these letters we see another side to Matisse – that of a kindly, worried, attentive father. They are very touching,” Barat-Mabille said.

In 1935, separated from Duthuit and living alone in Paris with their toddler son, Claude, Marguerite attempted to forge a career as a fashion designer with a collection sent to be shown in London. It was not a success.

During the second world war, she and her stepmother were active in the French Resistance. In 1945, Marguerite was denounced to the Gestapo in Rennes, and was arrested and tortured. After several months in prison, she was placed on the final deportation to the Ravensbrück concentration camp when Allied bombing disrupted the train carrying her and the other prisoners, and she escaped before reaching Germany.

Matisse’s final portraits of Marguerite date from 1945, and reflect his concern over the danger and suffering she endured during the war.

Marguerite Duthuit Matisse died in Paris in 1982, aged 87, while still cataloguing her father’s work.

“As well as being an occasion to pay tribute and rediscover Matisse the artist, this exhibition allows us to see a more personal side to him. Here we see Matisse the family man and father,” Barat-Mabille said.