Plum Blossoms, Green Background

In the last years of the 1940s Matisse painted a final run of large interiors at his villa in Vence, in the hills behind Nice, rooms built out of flat, saturated colour laid on in broad strokes. This canvas, from 1948, is one of them, and it has a twin. A second version, Plum Blossoms, Ochre Background, is in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and as their titles say, the two differ chiefly in colour. Matisse liked to repeat a composition to see what a change of colour would do to it, and he spoke of the magic of colour relationships. Here the plum branch and the room are set against green. In some passages, the gallery notes, the picture already points towards the paper cut-outs that would take up most of his remaining years.