Annelies, tulipani bianchi e anemoni

Matisse painted this in 1944, in the south of France, while the war was still on and he himself was frail after major cancer surgery a few years earlier. The calm of the scene hides what the sitter was living through. Annelies Nelck, a young painter, had just fled the German occupation of Holland for her parents' house in France. She had come pregnant and without her husband, Ernst Katan, whom she had met while studying art in Amsterdam. He was killed by the occupying forces the same year she sat for this. Matisse gives none of that away. He shows her in the evening, turning the pages of a book, framed between two full vases of white tulips and anemones.