Sitzender Akt (Matisse)

In 1909 Matisse took on the biggest commission of his life so far: two huge panels, Dance and Music, for the Moscow collector Sergei Shchukin. He was thinking on a grand scale, reducing bodies to a few sure contours, and this small canvas belongs to that season of work. Conservation has shown that he first set the model here in the same pose he used for a companion picture, Nude with a White Scarf, then put this one aside to concentrate on the other. The drawing stays blunt and deliberate, the flesh worked in warm pinks against a plain ground. A French collector couple, Marcel Sembat and Georgette Agutte, bought it and left it to the museum in Grenoble in 1923.