Odalisque au coffret rouge

By 1927 Matisse had settled in Nice and turned his rented rooms into a small theatre. He hung patterned textiles, set up screens and low divans, and posed a model in loose trousers as an odalisque, a harem woman of the sort he had glimpsed on trips to Algeria and Morocco years earlier. The whole Orient here is a fiction, built from props on the French Riviera. The model was Henriette Darricarrere, who sat for him through much of the decade. She lies on a green mattress with a striped wall behind her, an empty vase beside her. It is the small red lacquer box set on the floor that gives the painting its name.