Interior at Nice

From the autumn of 1918 Matisse spent his winters in Nice at the Hôtel de la Méditerranée, an old hotel on the Promenade des Anglais that has since been demolished. In 1952 he still remembered its Italian-style ceilings and tiled floors, and the light that came up through the shutters from below, like stage lighting. Everything there, he said, was fake, absurd, amazing, delicious. The hotel is all over this canvas: the pink tiled floor, the yellow patterned wallpaper, the skirted dressing table with its oval mirror, the tall French window. The view drops steeply from above toward the balcony, where his model of those years, Antoinette Arnoux, sits with her back to the sea and looks straight out at us. She appears again in the small picture on the left wall. Matisse's son Pierre, an art dealer in New York, sold the painting in 1936 to a Chicago couple, the Goodspeeds, and Elizabeth Goodspeed later gave it to the Art Institute.