Carmelina

When the Museum of Fine Arts acquired this, it had no intention of hanging it. Its curator Philip Hendy, later director of the National Gallery in London, bought 24 modern works in 1931 for what the museum called its Reserve collection, pictures for students to study but judged unfit for the public walls. Carmelina was among them, and her accession number still begins with RES. Matisse had painted her in 1903 in his Paris studio, a model sitting naked and square to us, looking straight out. Part of what unsettled people is in the mirror behind her. In it you can make out her back and, in a red shirt, the painter himself at work, so the canvas shows both sides of the sitting at once. The picture had already been seen in London, lent by the Paris dealers Bernheim-Jeune to Roger Fry's Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition in 1912. Boston bought it from the New York gallery of Pierre Matisse, the painter's son.