Michaela

The sitter has a name. Michaela Avogadro, an Italian woman, was one of the models Matisse worked with over a long stretch in Nice in the early 1940s, and her sister Carla posed for him too, as the dancer in a run of pictures from 1942. This canvas is from 1943, and the gallery gives it a fuller French title, Michaella, robe jaune et plante, Michaela in a yellow dress, with a plant. In places Matisse left the canvas unpainted, so the bare cloth itself serves as white, and those patches are still visible where the colour stops. The gallery draws attention to how the picture is put together, straight lines and curving ones set side by side and repeated across the canvas, with strong colours tuned so that the whole holds in balance.