Pianist and Checker Players

In 1924 Matisse's own children were grown. His daughter Marguerite turned 30 that summer, his sons Jean and Pierre were in their mid-twenties, and that year Pierre left France to settle in New York. In the rooms he rented in Nice, Matisse painted a family of stand-ins. The young woman at the piano is his model Henriette Darricarrère, and the two boys in striped jackets bent over the checkerboard are her younger brothers. In 1911, in a picture of his household at Issy, outside Paris, he had put his own sons at the same game, in a room crowded with pattern. The pattern is back here too, on the wallpaper, the carpet and the striped tablecloth, and on the chest of drawers at the right stands a cast of Michelangelo's Dying Slave. Matisse sold the canvas to the Paris gallery Bernheim-Jeune that October, and after the Second World War it passed through Pierre's own gallery in New York.