Interior with a Phonograph

In the autumn of 1921 Matisse gave up hotel rooms in Nice and rented an apartment on the place Charles-Félix, in the old town, and this canvas of 1924 shows those first rooms. He later moved to another flat in the same building, on the fourth floor. He furnished the place himself with paintings, mirrors, decorative panels and fabrics, and the gallery links much of that decoration to his travels in Andalusia, Algeria and Morocco. Here it is set against the world outside, the town glimpsed through a window beyond an open door, with a still life in front and the wind-up phonograph of the title. The canvas has a companion piece, Interior, Flowers and Parakeets, which once belonged to the Cone sisters, two collectors from Baltimore, and is now in the Baltimore Museum of Art. At the very back of this one, a mirror holds a small reflection of the painter himself.