Odalisque au fauteuil

By 1928 Matisse had spent much of a decade in rented rooms in Nice, turning them into small theatres. The odalisque, a harem woman of North African fantasy, was really a hired model in his hotel studio, posed among screens, striped hangings and patterned cloths he carried from place to place. He had travelled in Morocco years earlier, and these interiors keep something of that light and colour without pretending to be anywhere real. Here the figure sinks into an armchair, the whole room a weave of pattern around her. Matisse said the odalisques came out of reverie rather than observation, and this is one of the last of them.