Young Woman in White on a Red Background

By 1946 Matisse was 76 and living in the hills above Nice, at Vence. Five years earlier he had survived major surgery for cancer, which left him weak and often confined to bed for long stretches. He called what followed a kind of second life, and his painting turned flatter, calmer and more saturated with pure colour. Here a young woman sits in a white blouse against a field of flat red, drawn with a few sure black lines. There is almost no shading and little depth to the room. Within a couple of years he would put down the brush for scissors and make the large paper cut-outs, and begin designing the small chapel at Vence that he came to regard as his best work.