Interior with a Violin

Matisse painted this in the winter of 1917 to 1918, in a rented room at the Hotel de la Mediterranee in Nice, where he had come south partly to get away from the last winter of the war. The room does most of the work. He keeps it almost black, the wooden shutters drawn against the bright coast, so that only a few bars of blue sea and sky force their way in through the slats. On the near table an open case holds a violin, the instrument Matisse played himself. He would keep that hotel room for the next four years.