Matisse painted this charming composition in 1919 at his studio in Nice. Throughout the war he had swum against the tide of the Parisian avant-garde, committing himself to a style of painting that was grounded in form and color, but in early 1919 his determination was at its most strident: "Work monopolized him from the start," writes Hilary Spurling of this period. "Throughout the first months of 1919, he complained that the road lay uphill, that he was toiling like a carthorse, that his labors exhausted him and made him despair. But he had no doubt that he was on to something. ‘As for telling you what it will be like,' he wrote to his wife on 9th January 1919, 'that I couldn't say since it hasn't happened yet, but my idea is to push further and deeper into true painting'" (Hilary Spurling, Matisse the Master, A Life of Henri Matisse, The Conquest of Colour, London, 2005, p. 223).

The present work was once owned by Léopold Zborowski, an amateur poet turned art dealer who rose to prominence in the early twentieth century. Through his involvement in the bohemian circles of Paris he was introduced to the artists Moise Kisling and Maurice Utrillo, and offered to sell their works out of his apartment on the rue Joseph Bara. Zborowski would eventually become the champion of Chaim Soutine and most famously Amedeo Modigliani.

In 1919, Matisse paid regular visits to Pierre-Auguste Renoir who was in the final months of his life. As a young man, Matisse had been a frequent guest in Renoir’s studio and turned for advice and inspiration whom he saw as an antidote to the stultifying impact of Cubism that consumed his peers. As he explained in an interview: “Renoir’s work saves us from the drying-up effect of pure abstraction” (Henri Matisse quoted in Hilary Spurling, Matisse the Master, A Life of Henri Matisse, The Conquest of Colour, London, 2005, p. 223).

"Matisse rejoiced in the light of Nice; color was subordinated to it,” writes John Elderfield, “Thus, the flat, arbitrary colors of his preceding paintings, both 'decorative' and 'experimental,' were replaced by a much broader range of soft tonalities that convey how reflected light will suffuse an interior, associating whoever or whatever is within it. Light is almost palpable in these paintings. Their sensuality and the quality of meditation they afford both depend on the gentle pulsation of light through them" (John Elderfield, Henri Matisse, A Retrospective (exhibition catalogue), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1992-93, p. 289). Like Vermeer, the work of Matisse during this period preserved the serenity and lyrical intimacy of his models to great effect.

The artist Françoise Gilot speaking to her love of Matisse’s work.