Still Life with Pomegranates

By 1947 Matisse was 77 and living quietly in Vence, in the hills above Nice. He had come through major cancer surgery six years earlier and called what followed a second life. Too frail to stand long at an easel, he painted a short series of interiors, and this dish of pomegranates on a table, a window behind it open to a Riviera palm, is one of them. These were close to his last easel paintings. Soon he would give what strength he had left to the Rosary Chapel a short walk away, designing its windows and its walls. He stayed fond of this canvas. In 1949 he put its image on a tourist poster for Nice and wrote across it, in his own hand, Work and Joy.