The Sorrows of the King

By 1952 Matisse was in his eighties, often bedridden, and no longer able to stand at an easel. So he made pictures with scissors, cutting shapes from sheets his assistants had painted with gouache and pinning them to the wall until the arrangement felt right. This large one he treated as a kind of self-portrait. The black figure at its heart is Matisse himself, seated in his chair, surrounded by the things that had filled his life, a green dancer, a guitar-like shape, a scatter of yellow petals falling through the air like music. He was thinking of an old Rembrandt of the melancholy King Saul soothed by a harp. Matisse died two years later. The work now hangs in the Pompidou Centre in Paris.