Odalisca azul

After the First World War Matisse more or less moved to Nice, took rooms above the Mediterranean, and spent the early 1920s turning them into little stage sets. He hung patterned cloths, brought in screens and a model, and painted her reclining as an odalisque, a harem woman of the sort earlier French painters like Ingres had imagined. This one, from around 1921, is built out of blue, the figure laid down in fluid, watery washes against the decorated ground so that body and setting almost fuse into one flat pattern. Coming out of the war years, it is unashamedly about pleasure and colour and ease. Matisse was blunt about the pretext: he said he did odalisques in order to paint the nude. It entered the Paris collection of the dealer Paul Guillaume, and hangs today at the Orangerie.