Donna alla finestra

Matisse came down to Nice in December 1917 and stayed the winter in a hotel, then in another, and the hotel window turned into his subject. He painted the shutters, the light coming off the bay, and a model set between the room and the sea. This one is from 1920, the year he also made the sets and costumes for Diaghilev's ballet Le Chant du rossignol, and it belongs to that run of rented-room pictures. He would not take a flat of his own in Nice until the following year. The painting belongs to the national modern art collection in Paris, left to the state in 1959 by the industrialist Georges Grammont, and since 1972 it has hung in Saint-Tropez, in the old chapel Grammont restored to hold his pictures.