The Little Mulatta

Matisse painted this in Tangier early in 1912, during the first of two long winters he spent in Morocco. The strong North African light changed his colour, and the trips gave him a whole run of pictures of local people, gardens and windows. Models were hard to come by. In letters home he grumbled about how difficult it was to persuade anyone to sit for him, and leaned on a hotel porter to help find them. Here a young woman sits close up against the canvas, her face and shoulders built from a few frank, flat areas of colour with almost no shading. He worked quickly and kept the handling loose. The painting entered the museum in Grenoble in 1923, left to it as part of a collector's bequest.