Méditation

The full title has two halves, Méditation and Après le bain, after the bath, and the gallery takes the first at its word. Matisse painted this in 1920 in a room at the Hôtel de la Méditerranée, a hotel on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice where he stayed again and again in those years. Most of what he made there is bright, full of southern light and pattern. This canvas only partly follows that. Grey runs through the room, and the gallery reads it as the colour of concentration, which is just what the title announces. A woman sits turned toward the window, a subject Matisse came back to often in Nice, with the same diffused light and crowded decoration. Who she was is not easy to say, and the gallery leaves her without a name.