Intérieur au phonographe

By the early 1920s Matisse had settled into rented rooms in Nice and spent years painting little else but the space around him, its windows, patterned walls and a model by the shutters. This one, from 1924, is built around a wind-up phonograph, then still a fairly new machine to have sitting in an ordinary room. He frames the scene through a doorway and catches part of it again in a mirror, so the eye travels from the dim foreground into brighter light beyond. After the upheavals of the previous decade, pictures like this were deliberately calm. Fruit on a table, sunlight on a wall, and the phonograph standing ready to be played.