Woman in a Purple Coat

By 1937 Matisse was working in the south of France in a studio crowded with patterned cloths, and nearly all of it revolved around one person. The woman in the purple coat is Lydia Delectorskaya, a young Russian who had left the Soviet Union and turned up in his household in 1932, hired first to help care for his ailing wife. Within a couple of years she had become his main model and his right hand, and she would stay with him until he died. Here he wraps her in a coat of flat, singing violet and sets her against walls of clashing pattern, everything bound in thick black lines so the colours cannot bleed into one another. There is almost no depth and no shadow. The whole picture is laid out flat, like a design. Matisse was in his late sixties by now and cutting away whatever he found inessential, and what he kept was pure colour and the woman who ran his studio.