Großes rotes Interieur

This is a corner of the villa Matisse rented at Vence, in the hills behind Nice, where he lived from 1943 to 1949. He painted it in the spring of 1948, the last of a series of interiors begun there in 1946, and the last oil painting he finished.

Two framed works hang on the wall inside the picture, and both are his own, one of his brush drawings and his oil of a pineapple from that same year. The red was his decision rather than the room's. It runs across floor and wall without a break, so the table, the chair and his two pictures all sit in one field of colour, with the black and white drawing cutting through it.

Jean Cassou, who ran the national museum of modern art in Paris, picked this canvas for the collection, and the French state bought it in 1950.