Odalisque à la culotte rouge

In 1921, three years after the armistice, France was worn out by upheaval, and so, it seems, was the man once called the wildest painter in Paris. Back in 1905 critics had branded Matisse and his circle fauves, wild beasts, for throwing raw colour at the public. Now 51 and newly settled on the top floor of an apartment on the Place Charles-Félix in Nice, he spent that autumn turning his rooms into a small theatre: patterned screens, hung fabrics, a model in wide red harem trousers stretched out against the decor. She was Henriette Darricarrère, a young woman from Nice he would paint for years. This is the first of his odalisques, the languid Eastern studio fantasies that filled his 1920s. The old scandal had by now turned respectable. In 1922 the French state bought this very canvas for its museum of living artists, the first Matisse any Paris museum had acquired.