L'Asie

Matisse painted this in 1946, near the end of his life, in the hill town of Vence in the south of France where he had moved for his health. The model was a young woman named Madame Van Hyfte, born in Africa, whom he sat several times through that year. He dressed her in one of his beloved studio costumes, a Chinese coat lined with Siberian tiger fur, and called the finished picture Asia. The name nods to an old European habit of letting a woman's figure stand for a whole continent. The colours are flat and singing, the drawing pared to a few sure lines. It comes from the same late years in which Matisse, often working from a wheelchair or bed, was turning toward the cut-paper shapes of his final decade.