Lorette à la tasse de café

A canvas one and a half metres wide and less than one metre high is an odd shape for a single figure, and Matisse chose it on purpose. In 1917 he painted his model Lorette in three of these wide, landscape-shaped canvases. In the first, a nude, her body lies on a red flowered cloth and looks almost boxed in. Here she is dressed, barely, in a slip, a loose robe and stockings, and she seems to float on an open ground of pale yellows and greys with nothing to hold her. Only the corner by her head is fixed, by a small Moorish table carrying a cup of coffee. The Pompidou's curators read it as a souvenir of Morocco, where Matisse had spent two winters just before the war. A close-up of her head beside the same table and cup is in the Art Institute of Chicago. This canvas entered the French national collection in 2001, accepted by the state in payment of tax.