For Le Tiaré, of which is exposed here a replica made in white marble by Jean Matisse, the artist's son, Matisse makes use of the smooth surface that he had tested with Henriette II at the beginning of the 1920’s. The head was created after his stay in Tahiti in 1930, merging the physiognomy of a woman's face with the shape of a gardenia, called a 'tiare'. We could image the artistic metamorphosis of a flower into a woman's head, or vice versa, of a head into a corolla. There are also references to African statuary and its syntheses, including a possible comparison, obvious here, with the Ligbi mask from the Ivory Coast.