Although Henri Matisse (1869-1954) is celebrated as one of the great colourists of the 20th century, drawing in black and white was extremely important to him. This included his lithographs, of which he made over 300. Of these, almost a third are in the V&A's collection. Very many are of female figures, nude or otherwise dressed in exotic clothes, as they appear in his paintings. Matisse stressed that it was relationships between colours, rather than individual colours on their own, which gave them impact; monochrome lithography gave him the opportunity to experiment with, and analyse, the tonal relationships that juxtapositions of different colours provide.