The Green Blouse

By 1936 Matisse had lived and worked in the south of France for years, and he finished this portrait in his Nice studio on 21 March. A woman in a green blouse and a pale hat has turned in her chair to face us. Look past her, though, at the balustrade with a small boat slipping between two trees. That view isn't Nice at all. It reaches back to 1930, when Matisse, in his sixties and unsure where his art should go next, sailed to Tahiti and spent three months in the Pacific. He painted almost nothing there, but the light and the lagoons stayed with him and kept surfacing in his work for years. Here they hover behind a sitter in a French room. The canvas came to the museum in Copenhagen in 1938.