Girl in Yellow and Blue with Guitar

Matisse painted this in Nice in the spring of 1939: a young woman in a yellow jacket and a wide blue skirt, head resting on her hand, a guitar propped against her knee. Its path over the next few years is recorded in unusual detail. It belonged to Paul Rosenberg, Matisse's Paris dealer, and after the German occupation it was seized by the Nazi agency that held confiscated art at the Jeu de Paume museum. In November 1942 it went to a German dealer, Gustav Rochlitz, in one of the swaps made for Hermann Göring, who traded away modern pictures the regime despised for the old masters he wanted. In 1943 it was with the Paris dealer Paul Pétridès and was reproduced in a Paris book of Matisse's recent work. After the war it was returned to Rosenberg in New York, and by 1947 it belonged to the Chicago collectors Chauncey and Marion McCormick, whose son's estate left it to the Art Institute in 2007.