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By 1952 Matisse was in his early 80s and too frail to stand long at an easel, so he worked lying down or from a wheelchair, cutting shapes from sheets his assistants had painted in flat colour. He called it drawing with scissors. This near life-size figure grew on the wall of his apartment in Nice, and he kept re-pinning the pieces well into 1953 until the arms and legs found their spread. The blue body, the small dark head, the burst of orange and yellow around the waist have led many to read the figure as Josephine Baker, the American dancer whose banana skirt had made her the sensation of 1920s Paris. Matisse had less than two years to live when he settled the last cut-out into place.