Figure en bronze

Around 1908 Matisse was making sculptures and paintings side by side, and here he painted one of his own bronzes: a small reclining nude he had modelled the year before, propped on a studio stand. In front of it sits a blue jug of red carnations, and behind it the edge of a folding screen. So the picture is a still life and a figure at once, a naked woman who is really a piece of cast metal on a table. Painting his own sculpture let Matisse keep the old subject of the reclining nude while working from something that would hold perfectly still. That bronze survives too, cast and shown elsewhere as a sculpture in its own right.