Seated Woman, Back Turned to the Open Window

After the war Matisse spent his winters in rented rooms in Nice, above the Bay of Angels, and fitted them out like small stages, hanging the walls with patterned textiles and shifting a screen and a few chairs around. This is one of those rooms, painted about 1922. Much of the Paris avant-garde had come back from the trenches demanding order and severity, and Matisse was being told he had gone decorative. What he made instead was a room with a woman turned away from us, an open window, palm trees and sailing boats, and the flat winter light of a resort town. Her back sets the depth of the room, and behind it the sea is graded band by band. Montreal bought the picture in 1949, when Matisse was 79 and had largely given up the easel for cut paper.