Henri Matisse

Matisse's first visited Nice in 1917 and spent the next few years dividing his time between Paris and various hotels in this Riviera refuge.  In 1921 the artist took up residence at 1, Place Charles-Félix, and this apartment would remain his seasonal home for the next 17 years. 

The present work is related to a series of drawings first executed by Matisse in 1935.  According to John Elderfield, "This series explores the subject of a model reclining against a decorative background.  It incorporates the motif of a reflected mirror image and signals the presence of the artist himself by including the edge of his sketch pad, his hand or part of his silhouette.  Using unshaded line drawing, Matisse investigates here the flowing arabesque, the figure-ground relationship, and the whiteness of the paper as the source of light and color projected against a profusely patterned background.  The expressive possibilities of a thin unshaded black line against the whitness of the sheet were revealed to Matisse in 1931 while working on the etchings for Mallarmé's Poésies.  The 1935-37 drawing series seems to be a further development of that interest.  Several of these drawings... were published by Christian Zervos in a special issue of Cahiers d'art in 1936." (John Elderfield, The Drawings of Henri Matisse, New York, 1985, p. 270)