Nu drapé étendu

In the early 1920s Matisse was living in hotel rooms in Nice, on the Mediterranean, and painting little else but women reclining in shuttered light. After a decade of hard, radical experiment he had turned, to the surprise of many, toward warmth and ease, staging his models as odalisques among patterned screens and hangings. This one is stripped almost bare. Where those pictures usually pile on decoration, here there is only a red curtain, a plain white sheet over the couch, and the figure. Matisse was blunt about what these paintings were for. I do odalisques, he said, in order to paint the nude. The canvas came to the Orangerie in 1963, part of a great private collection assembled in Paris between the wars.