Vase of Flowers

Matisse painted this in 1924 in Nice, and the window and wall belong to one of the rooms facing the sea in his flat on the Place Charles-Félix. A vase of flowers stands among patterned fabric and wallpaper, and the museum in Boston reads the whole thing as an exercise in balancing shapes and colours that ought to clash, abrupt and harmonious at once. Its first owner was a Paris collector, Georges Bernheim. In November 1928 it hung in New York at the Knoedler gallery in a show called A Century of French Painting, listed only as coming from the collection of a Mr Georges B. On the last day of that year Knoedler sold it to John Taylor Spaulding, a Boston collector who, with his brother William, had already given the museum thousands of Japanese woodblock prints. Spaulding kept the painting for 20 years and left it to the museum when he died in 1948, along with his other modern French pictures.