Breakfast

By 1920 the painter who had once shocked Paris with slabs of raw, clashing colour had settled into something much quieter. Henri Matisse spent long stretches of these post-war years in Nice, on the Mediterranean, in a faded old hotel called the Hôtel de la Méditerranée whose light he loved. This is one of its rooms. His model, a young woman named Antoinette, sits at a table with a red-and-white striped cloth, looking up from her book as if her thoughts have drifted somewhere else. The striped cloth, the upholstered chair and the oval mirror turn up again and again in the pictures he made that year, rearranged like furniture in a small stage set. The First World War had ended barely two years earlier, and much of Matisse's work now retreats into rooms exactly like this one.