Plate of Fruit and Flowering Ivy in a Rose-Pattern Pot

Ivy flowers late in the year, in early autumn, in small greenish clusters, and this canvas is dated to October 1941. That year Matisse, at 71, had spent months in clinics in Lyon after a major operation, and he was back in Nice by May. In the months that followed, drawing took hold of him. Across 1941 and 1942 he made the long sequence later published as Themes and Variations, drawing the same plant, jug or model again and again, first slowly in charcoal, then in quick runs of pen line. The gallery points to the same thing in this still life, colour and line working together and the drawing done with the brush. A plate of fruit sits beside a pot decorated with a rose, and in it the ivy is in flower.