Studio, Quai Saint-Michel

Matisse painted this room in the late winter or early spring of 1916, while the battle of Verdun was being fought in the east of France. It is his studio at 19 quai Saint-Michel, above the Seine. Through the tall window you can make out the Palais de Justice and the thin spire of the Sainte-Chapelle. Indoors, walls, window frames and floorboards are cut down to hard verticals and horizontals, and pictures turn up inside the picture, hanging on the wall or propped against a chair. On the couch lies Laurette, his favourite model of those months, whom he painted in almost 50 works. The canvas was never signed. The collector Duncan Phillips bought it in 1940 from the New York gallery of Matisse's son Pierre, ten years after the artist had visited his museum in Washington.