Odalisque with Raised Arms

By 1923 Matisse had left Paris for the light of Nice, where he spent years turning rented rooms into small painted stage sets of patterned cloth and screens. The woman here, nude but for sheer harem trousers and seated in a striped armchair, is Henriette Darricarrere, a young local who modelled for him through most of the 1920s. The costume and the setting were pure invention, props he kept in the studio. Matisse traced the whole idea back to a trip to Morocco in 1912, and he was blunt about why he painted these figures. He said he did odalisques in order to paint nudes, because he had been to Morocco and knew such women existed. The decor does most of the talking. The figure sits quietly inside it.