Odalisque

Matisse moved to Nice in the winter of 1917 and by the middle of the 1920s was working in an apartment on the place Charles-Felix, above the flower market of the old town, with the sea at the windows. He turned the rooms into a stage. Folding screens, patterned hangings and costumes out of a trunk went up around the model, and the light of the south came through the shutters onto all of it. The woman in most of these pictures was Henriette Darricarrere, a dancer and musician from Nice who posed for him from 1920 until 1927. The canvas is small, about half a metre tall. The same screen, the same low table and the same lengths of patterned cloth turn up from picture to picture through those Nice years.