Odalisque in Red Pants

Matisse painted his odalisques in Nice through the 1920s, in rented rooms hung with patterned screens and striped cloth, models dressed and posed as harem women, an imagined East staged in a French hotel room. This one, a woman in loose red trousers set against those flat decorative bands, went to a museum in Caracas. Sometime around 2000 it quietly vanished. A thief had lifted the canvas out of its frame and left a copy in its place, and the museum went on showing the fake for two years before anyone realised. The real painting surfaced again in 2012 in a Miami hotel sting run by undercover FBI agents posing as buyers, and was sent back to Venezuela.