弹曼陀林的女子

After years of bold, flat Fauvist colour, Henri Matisse spent the early 1920s doing something gentler. He had settled in Nice on the Mediterranean coast, in an apartment on the place Charles-Felix with two rooms looking out over the seafront, and he filled canvas after canvas with quiet interiors bathed in that southern light. He called it a soft, gentle light in spite of its brightness. Here a young woman stands with her back to the window holding a small mandolin, and her faint reflection in the glass gives her a kind of double. This was the decade after the First World War, when many artists across Europe pulled back from experiment toward calmer, more familiar subjects. The canvas later joined the collection of the Paris dealer Paul Guillaume, whose pictures now fill the Orangerie beside the Tuileries garden.