Zurückgelehnter Akt, auf dem Rücken liegend

By 1946 Matisse was 76 and living inland at Vence, in a rented villa he had taken in 1943 when the coast around Nice was thought unsafe. Surgery for cancer five years earlier had left him working in short spells, often from his bed, and most of what he made in those years was drawing, with the cut paper shapes just beginning.

This canvas he stopped early and never took further. The figure lies back with her head dropped toward the lower corner of the picture, a pose he came back to repeatedly in ink in the same period. The city of Nice owns it, and it hangs at the Matisse museum up at Cimiez, in a red 17th-century villa standing in an olive grove above the town.