La seduta delle tre

By 1924 Matisse had spent seven winters in Nice, working in rented rooms above the sea that he filled with patterned wallpaper, pierced North African textiles and a view of palm trees. The woman at the easel is Henriette Darricarrere, his main model through those years. She was a trained musician and dancer whose stage fright had grown severe enough that by 1924 she gave up performing in public, and Matisse began teaching her to paint in the same year he made this canvas. She is shown at work, her own small picture on the easel in front of her. On top of the mirrored wardrobe behind her stands a plaster of a reclining figure, one of Matisse's own sculptures, which turns up again in other paintings of these rooms.