Tabac Royal

The dates of this canvas are known to the day. Matisse began it on 27 February 1943 and finished it on 10 March, in his flat in the old Hotel Regina on the hill above Nice. The title comes from a jar on the table labelled Tabac Royal. It was an object he was attached to, one of several he kept around him for years, and it turns up again in his work, and not only in paintings. Around it he gathered things he had painted many times before, a figure in an interior, patterned decoration, a nod to music, now handled with freer colour and simpler forms. Alfred Barr, the first director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the author of the great early study of Matisse, placed this picture in a series with Michaela, painted the same year. Michaela hangs here too, in the same room.