Ballerina, sfondo nero, poltrona rocaille

Matisse found the chair first. In 1942 a silvered rococo armchair turned up in a Nice antique shop, and he wrote that the sight of it had bowled him over and that he was possessed by it. It would go into a painting once he was ready for it. Here it stands in a room with a black floor, beside a young Italian woman, Carla, posed as a dancer. He was 73, working in an apartment in the old Regina hotel above Nice in occupied France, and still moving badly after the abdominal surgery of the year before. The canvas afterwards travelled through the family. His son Pierre had married Alexina Sattler, who later married Marcel Duchamp, and for years it hung on Duchamp's wall in New York. The Artizon Museum in Tokyo bought it from her daughter in 2021.