Interior at Nice

The war had been over a few months when Matisse painted this. He was wintering in Nice by then, working in rented hotel rooms along the seafront, and in January 1919 he met Antoinette Arnoud, who would pose for him for the next two and a half years. Here she sits by an open window in a blue-grey dressing gown edged with purple, reading. Pictures like this one divided the people who followed him. Conservative critics were relieved and read them as a return to the French tradition of painting, while younger artists who had come to him for flat, radical colour thought he had gone quiet on them. Matisse worked this same room and figure through several versions, shifting the colour each time. The Saint Louis Art Museum bought this one in 1945.