Femme sur un tabouret haut

Matisse painted this early in 1914 in his Paris flat on the quai Saint-Michel, looking across the Seine. The sitter was Germaine Raynal, wife of the art critic Maurice Raynal, though you would not call it a flattering likeness. This was Matisse at his most severe, working close to Cézanne and to the Cubists around him, a bare geometric room, dark outlines, a muted grey laid over earlier flashes of blue, green and red that still show through at the edges. He reworked the figure over and over, scraping and covering as he went. A few months after he set it aside, the war broke out. Matisse, then 44, was turned down for military service and stayed in France, painting these austere, close-toned pictures through the first years of the fighting.