Donna con violino

By the early 1920s Matisse had left the shocks of his Fauve years behind and settled into hotel rooms in Nice, painting quiet interiors flooded with Mediterranean light. He worked on this around 1921. The subject was close to home, because Matisse played the violin himself, practising daily, and he kept the instrument near him through these Nice years. The woman sits with her chin on her hand, the bow at rest, caught in the pause rather than the playing. He answers every straight line with a curve: the legs of the table against the round of the screen and the sweep of the violin's body. It came to the Orangerie with the collection of the dealer Paul Guillaume.