Girl with a Tricorne

By 1923 the wild color that made Matisse notorious a generation earlier had cooled into something quieter. He was living in Nice, on the Mediterranean, working through the winters in rented rooms flooded with southern light, painting models in costume as if staging small private theatricals. Here the young woman wears an 18th-century outfit with a tricorne, the three-cornered hat, the kind of dress worn for Carnival in Venice, which is why Matisse called the picture Venitienne, the Venetian girl. There is no story to her and no drama, just a figure posed for the pleasure of the fabric, the hat, the fall of light on a face. Emily Sibley Watson bought it for the gallery in Rochester in 1924, the year after it was painted.