Odalisca seduta

By 1926 Matisse had been spending his winters in Nice for close to a decade, working in a flat above the old flower market on the place Charles-Félix. He turned the rooms into a stage set. Screens, striped hangings and North African textiles he had collected went up around the model, and he painted the same corner over and over with the props shifted. The woman in most of these pictures was Henriette Darricarrère, a young woman from Nice who sat for him for about seven years and also played the violin and danced. Critics in Paris were cool about the results. Much of French painting after the war had turned back toward calm and order, and a studio full of borrowed cloth looked to some like a comfortable place to sit it out. The canvas reached the Metropolitan in 1962, a gift of the Adele R. Levy Fund.