Portrait of the Artist's Wife

Matisse painted this in the garden of his house at Issy-les-Moulineaux in the summer of 1913, not long after two winters in Morocco had loosened his colour and flattened his sense of space. His wife Amélie sat for it many times over several months, and what he arrived at keeps the pose of a formal society portrait while draining the face of ordinary likeness. Her features are simplified almost to a grey mask, set against the blues and greens he had brought back from the south. Within a year the Moscow collector Sergei Shchukin bought it, one of dozens of Matisses he took home to Russia. It hangs today in the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg.