Tea

In the summer of 1919, the first after the armistice, Matisse was working in the garden of his house at Issy-les-Moulineaux on the edge of Paris. The war had gone badly for his family. His mother and brother spent it in Bohain, the northern town he grew up in, under German occupation, and his brother was held for a time as a hostage. What he painted that summer is over two metres wide, the largest canvas he produced in those years. Two women sit at a tea table under the trees, his daughter Marguerite in the wide hat on the right, and Antoinette Arnoud, the model who had posed for him through the war. The dog stretched on the gravel belongs to the household and is busy scratching herself. In 1925 the painting went to Sarah and Michael Stein, the American collectors whose Paris flat was where a great many people first saw a Matisse at all.