Zorah on the Terrace

At the start of 1912 Matisse left the grey Paris winter for Tangier, partly on commissions from two Russian collectors, Shchukin and Morozov, who were buying his work faster than anyone in France. Morocco gave him the light he'd chased for years, but finding a model was hard, since few local women would sit. Zorah, a young woman he painted several times, is shown crouched on a carpet in the shade of a terrace wall, a bowl of goldfish beside her. Matisse flattens almost everything into calm bands of blue-green shadow. This canvas hung as one panel of what's now called his Moroccan Triptych, three paintings Morozov kept together, and it is still in Moscow today.