La Fenêtre ouverte

From the winter of 1917 onwards Matisse worked in Nice, and in 1919 he had a room at the Hôtel de la Méditerranée on the seafront. He was fond of that building, the old Italian plaster ceilings and the tiled floors, and above all the light coming through the louvred shutters, which he said reached him from below like the footlights in a theatre. The window is in nearly every canvas of those years, with the balcony rail, the curtain, the sea beyond flattened to a band. This one is small, about 60 centimetres tall. The critic Georges Besson, who knew Matisse for decades and collected him, gave it with his wife Adèle to the French state in 1963, and since 1965 it has been on deposit at the musée Albert-André at Bagnols-sur-Cèze, a small museum in the Gard whose modern collection came largely from painters and their friends.