Young Woman Lying on a White Fur

Matisse painted this in 1944, in the south of France, while the country was under German occupation. He was 74 and had never fully recovered from major surgery three years earlier, so he worked in short spells, often from a bed. That year the war reached his own household. His daughter Marguerite, active in the Resistance, was arrested and tortured by the Gestapo and only narrowly escaped a deportation train. None of that dread shows here. The reclining figure, the white fur, the flat warm colours belong to the calm, sensuous indoor world Matisse went on building right through the war. The painting entered the French national collection in 2001, handed over in place of tax, and now hangs in the museum at Grenoble.