Nu dans un fauteuil, plante verte

By the time Matisse painted this in November 1936, he was in his late sixties, living in an apartment up in Cimiez, on the hill above Nice. He had just come through a huge job, the wall-sized Dance mural for the Barnes collection in Pennsylvania, and afterward he pulled right back to something small and close at hand: a model resting in an armchair, a leafy plant beside her, an open pink blouse. What he keeps working at here is drawing with colour. The space is flat, the pot plant and the chair flatten into pattern, and the whole thing has the ease of a man who no longer needs to prove anything. His wife Amélie kept the canvas, and in 1960 she left it to the museum in Nice that carries his name.