Odaliske mit Tamburin

Through the 1920s Matisse was living in Nice, on the Mediterranean, and he turned a rented flat above the seafront into a small stage set. Rugs, patterned hangings, costumes and props came out, and a young local model named Henriette Darricarrere, a former dancer, would pose among them as an odalisque, the harem women of European fantasy. He painted this one in the winter of 1925 into 1926. After the flat, spare canvases that had unsettled Paris before the war, these Nice pictures are warm, crowded and frankly decorative, and some of his old admirers thought he had gone soft. The tambourine on the floor is a leftover of the staging, a prop from the dancer's own world set down at the model's feet.