Woman on Rose Divan

After the First World War Matisse left Paris and settled in Nice, on the Mediterranean, and his painting shifted key. The bold, flat shocks of his Fauve years gave way to warm, quiet rooms, with models in patterned robes lounging among the North African textiles and screens he collected. This small canvas from 1921 is one of the first of them, the start of a whole decade of what he called odalisques. He worked quickly here, straight onto a primed canvas with no drawing underneath, letting colour and a few soft contours carry it. The woman settles back into a rose-coloured divan, hemmed in by decorative hangings. In April 1921 Matisse sold the picture to his Paris dealer along with a batch of similar new works.