Reader at the Yellow Table

In the lower left corner, after his name, Matisse wrote the date, 4/44, April 1944. That spring he was living at Vence, in the hills behind Nice, in a France still under German occupation, and in the same season his wife Amélie and his daughter Marguerite were arrested for their work in the Resistance. Marguerite was held and tortured by the Gestapo in a prison in Rennes. The young woman at the yellow table is Annelies Nelck, Dutch-born, still in her teens, whose parents lived near Vence. She had come to his villa the summer before to ask for advice, and he took her on to pose and to help, sorting his drawings once a month, destroying the bad ones, fixing the charcoal. Here she bends over an open illustrated book, beside two pomegranates, a small vase of red flowers and a wine glass drawn in black outline.