Femme au divan

By 1921 Matisse was living in Nice, in rented rooms above the Mediterranean, and painting almost nothing but their interiors. A woman rests on a divan among patterned hangings and a tiled floor, the shutters letting in the flat southern light he had moved south to find. After the strain of the First World War, this deliberate ease unsettled some of his old admirers, who felt he had gone soft and merely decorative. He did not seem to mind. He arranged these rooms like small stage sets, carried in fabrics and folding screens, and posed a hired model in them day after day, less as a person than as one more shape among the patterns.