명상

Matisse painted this in 1920 in a rented room at the Hôtel Méditerranée in Nice, a young woman in a turban and dressing gown resting after her bath. A decade earlier he had been the wild man of French colour, the Fauve whose canvases scandalised Paris. After the First World War he changed key. He settled into these sunlit southern hotel rooms and painted quiet, comfortable interiors, women at ease, patterned cloths, soft light off the sea. The red-striped tablecloth here turns up in other pictures from the same weeks. Some critics who wanted him to keep pushing found the new gentleness a retreat, but he kept at these Nice interiors for years afterward.