Il pittore e la sua modella

Matisse painted this in his studio on the fourth floor at 19 Quai Saint-Michel in Paris, in the last stretch of the First World War. It shows the room itself, the model Laurette posed in a chair on the left, the artist seated at his easel on the right rendered as a stiff grey figure, and the canvas he is working on set between them. The mood is severe and boxed-in, all greys and blacks and hard angles, a long way from the hot colour people expect of Matisse. That austerity belongs to the war years, when he stayed in Paris and worked in this pared-down way. Soon after finishing it he left for Nice on the Riviera, where the light pulled his painting back toward warmth and ease.