The Moorish Screen

In the autumn of 1921 Matisse gave up living in hotel rooms in Nice and took a third-floor apartment at 1 place Charles-Felix, above the flower market in the old town. He painted this soon after moving in. The thing behind the two women is not really a screen. It is a pair of embroidered cotton hangings from his own collection of textiles, the stitching imitating the pierced woodwork of North African window screens, the kind of object he had been buying since his trips to Spain and Morocco before the war. Their pattern runs into the flowered wallpaper and the carpet and the dresses until it takes a moment to see where one ends. The two women are his daughter Marguerite and Henriette Darricarrere, a violinist and dancer from Nice who modelled for him for seven years.