Интерьер с фонографом

By the early 1920s Matisse had settled into rented rooms in Nice and spent years painting little else but the space around him, its windows, patterned walls and a model by the shutters. This one, from 1924, is built around a wind-up phonograph, then still a fairly new machine to have sitting in an ordinary room. He frames the scene through a doorway and catches part of it again in a mirror, so the eye travels from the dim foreground into brighter light beyond. After the upheavals of the previous decade, pictures like this were deliberately calm. Fruit on a table, sunlight on a wall, and the phonograph standing ready to be played.