Completed in 1924, Femme assise, les bras levées is a charcoal study for several prints and paintings Matisse executed of Henriette, the longest serving model of the artist’s Nice period. This drawing captures the relaxation, sensuousness and intimacy that characterizes Matisse’s Nice-period works. While many of these works involved rich, intricate interiors, Matisse’s focus was always on the model, as the present drawing reveals.

Discussing the works from the Nice period, Matisse wrote: "My models, human figures, are never just 'extras' in an interior. They are the principal theme in my work. I depend entirely on my model, whom I observe at liberty, and then I decide on the pose which best suits her nature. When I take a new model, I intuit the pose that will best suit her from her un-self-conscious attitudes of repose, and then I become the slave of that pose. I often keep those girls several years, until my interest is exhausted. My plastic signs probably express their souls (a word I dislike), which interests me subconsciously, or what else is there? Their forms are not always perfect, but they are expressive. The emotional interest aroused in me by them does not appear particularly in the representation of their bodies, but often rather in the lines or the special values distributed over the whole canvas or paper, which form its complete orchestration, its architecture. But not everyone perceives this. It is perhaps sublimated sensual pleasure, which may not yet be perceived by everyone" (quoted in Ernst Gerhard Güse, Henri Matisse, Drawings and Sculpture, Munich, 1991, p. 22).