Le Boudoir

In the years just after the First World War, Matisse spent his winters in Nice, working out of rented rooms at the Hôtel de la Méditerranée looking over the sea. He painted those rooms again and again, their light, their wallpaper, their shuttered windows, and the women he posed in them. This is one of those interiors, a curtained boudoir with two figures, one of them his regular Nice model Henriette Darricarrère. After the flat, radical colour of his earlier work, these Nice pictures surprised people with how soft and domestic they were, all patterned fabrics and quiet afternoons. Matisse kept a set of these hotel rooms as his studio until 1921, the year this was painted, before he moved to an apartment higher up in the town.