La sesión de la mañana

By 1924 Matisse had been living for three years on the third floor of 1 place Charles-Felix in Nice, in rooms above the old town where the light off the bay came in all day. His model through those years was Henriette Darricarrere, a young woman from Nice who had trained as a dancer and a violinist and who by then had turned to painting. Matisse taught her himself.

This canvas shows her at an easel of her own, working in the morning rather than posing. He set up the same scene again later in the day, and that picture, now at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, carries the hour in its title too: The Three O'Clock Sitting. When he sent this one to the Salon d'Automne in 1925 it went in under a longer name, Interior, the model, morning. It has never belonged to a museum. It went from Matisse to a New York dealer and has passed between private collectors ever since.