Purple Robe and Anemones

By 1937 Matisse was in his late sixties, living and working in an apartment in Nice, and Lydia Delectorskaya, his Russian assistant, sat for most of the paintings of these years. She is the calm figure in the purple robe here, still at the centre of a room that has otherwise gone wild, the stripes of the gown picked up in the wallpaper and the patterned cloth and the jug in front. In places he scraped the wet paint back with the end of the brush to cut the stripes into the robe. Etta Cone, one of two sisters from Baltimore who had been buying Matisse since before the First World War, bought this one, which is how a Nice interior now hangs in Maryland.