Femme aux anémones

After the war Matisse left Paris for Nice and, for the better part of a decade, mostly painted quiet rooms. Here a woman rests with an open book, and beside her anemones stand in a vase on the table. It is a long way from the shocking colour that had made his name before 1914. The mood is domestic and unhurried, the light coming soft off the Mediterranean. For years this canvas was catalogued as a work of 1937, until scholars placed it back where it belongs, in the early Nice years around 1920. The anemones are a winter and early-spring flower, the kind that filled the Nice markets in the months Matisse was settling in.