La tovaglia rosa

By 1924 Matisse had left Paris for Nice, renting a top-floor flat on the place Charles-Felix that looked over the Mediterranean. The years just after the First World War were, for him, a deliberately quiet stretch given over to sunlit rooms and small arranged things. This tablecloth was one of his regular props. The same pink cloth, the blue-and-white vase and the little white fruit stand turn up across several still lifes he set out on that table between 1924 and 1925. He flattens the fruit and flowers into patterned shapes and lets the pink of the cloth press against the colours around it. When the Glasgow collector William McInnes first saw the picture he wanted it at once, though it took a friend's coaxing before he was brave enough to buy.