Marguerite Asleep

The sleeping woman is Marguerite, Matisse's eldest child and, for decades, his most constant model — she sat for hundreds of his pictures. As a girl she nearly died of diphtheria and was given an emergency tracheotomy, and it left a scar across her throat. In most portraits of her you will notice a black ribbon or a high collar there, put on to hide it. In the summer of 1920 she went through a second operation on that throat, and afterward her father took her to Étretat, on the Normandy coast, to rest and gather her strength by the sea. He painted her asleep. Matisse worked fast and loose, the way he always did. And this is one of the first times he left the throat bare, with nothing tied over the scar at all.