Interior, flores e periquitos

Matisse spent the 1920s in a rented flat on the place Charles-Felix in Nice, several floors above the flower and vegetable market of the old town. He took it in 1921 and kept it until 1938, and the rooms became the work. The hangings and screens and patterned fabrics he had brought back from Morocco and elsewhere were set up in front of the windows, rearranged, and painted.

Paris had opinions about this. Younger painters who had followed the hard, flat canvases of his Fauve years and the severe wartime pictures treated the Nice interiors as a comfortable retreat, and said so in print.

Etta Cone of Baltimore bought this one in 1925, a year after it was painted, and it is said to have been among her favourites. She and her sister Claribel, whose money came from a Southern textile business, ended up with about 500 works by Matisse and left everything to their city.