Die drei Schwestern

Matisse painted this in 1917, the year he began spending his winters in Nice, turning away from the flat, daring work of his earlier years toward something calmer and more grounded. Three young women, all dark-haired, sit together against a warm brown ground. Two look out at us while the third bends over a book, lost in her reading. The same models sat for him repeatedly around this time, and a set of related canvases of them ended up at the Barnes Foundation near Philadelphia. This one passed instead to the dealer Paul Guillaume, who bought it partly in memory of those pictures he had let go to Barnes. It hangs today with the rest of his collection at the Orangerie in Paris.