The Lute

By 1943 the war had reached the Riviera. Italian troops had held Nice since the previous November, the Germans took over from them in September, and the bombing that spring had Matisse looking for somewhere inland. He went on painting his rooms. This one is vermilion, wall and floor worked over with the flat decorative patterns he was using then, and a woman sits in it with a lute across her lap. Music came to him from the playing side. Matisse had taken up the violin seriously in middle age and practised in the bathroom with the door shut, so that nobody else in the house had to hear him. Later that year he moved out to a villa called Le Reve at Vence, in the hills behind the coast, and stayed there until 1948.