The artist’s model Antoinette Arnoud twists in her chair and glances from her book, lost in melancholic thoughts or daydreams. Similar images of women in interiors are frequent among Henri Matisse’s work from the early 1920s. The table with red-and-white striped tablecloth, upholstered chair, and oval mirror were recurring props in related compositions of the same year, and the placement of their juxtaposed shapes, patterns, and colors in gentle visual tension was also a repeated compositional device. The setting of this picture is a room in the Hôtel de la Méditerranée, an establishment facing the harbor of the city of Nice on France’s southern coast, where Matisse lived and worked intermittently from 1918 to 1920.
A public scandal over the challenging appearance of his works—the rawness and immediacy of their color in particular—brought fame to Henri Matisse (French, 1869–1954) in 1905. Matisse, however, was no less remarkable as a draftsman. Though the artist’s work went through many changes over a long career, its essential method was to distill his emotional response to a given still life, landscape, or human form (his principal theme) in luminous color and pure, flowing line. The museum’s holdings cover aspects of Matisse’s work from 1900 to 1950 across the mediums of painting, sculpture, drawing, printmaking, the artist’s book, and ceramics. Many of the key works came as gifts from Philadelphians who collected Matisse in the years following World War I.
Source: Philadelphia Museum of Art
