Blumenfest, Nizza

Every winter Nice holds a flower parade, the Fête des fleurs, floats moving along the seafront while the riders throw blossoms into the crowd. It had stopped during the war, and by 1923 it was running again along with the tourist season the coast lived on. Matisse watched that year's parade from the balcony of his room at the Hôtel de la Méditerranée on the Promenade des Anglais, where he had been working since he first wintered in Nice in 1917. The two women at the rail are his daughter Marguerite and his model Henriette Darricarrère, holding flowers ready to drop on the procession below. Matisse had found Henriette at the film studios on the edge of Nice, where she was working as an extra, and she sat for him for about seven years.