梅花

Matisse painted this in 1948, when he was nearly 80 and rarely out of bed. It belongs to a last group of oil paintings he made in his studio at Vence, in the south of France, bright interiors built from flat blocks of red and orange. Soon after, he more or less gave up the brush. With his hands and health failing, he turned to cutting shapes from painted paper and to designing a chapel nearby, and never really came back to easel painting. For decades this particular canvas then dropped out of sight. A Matisse specialist searching for the 1992 retrospective hunted it across several continents without success, and the public did not see it again until 2005, when the Museum of Modern Art in New York managed to buy it. The woman at the table has a face left almost blank, all the intensity handed instead to the flowers.