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• Woman Seated with Open Book

• Henri Matisse

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• Femme assise au livre ouvert, January 1919
  Oil on canvas
  
  From 1917 to 1932, Henri Matisse made annual trips to the south of France. These winter sojourns, commencing when the artist was forty-eight years old, "may have begun as a symbolic return to the adventures, challenges, and yearnings of his earlier years" (J. Cowart, Henri Matisse: The Early Years in Nice, 1916-1930, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1986, p. 26).
  
  By this time, Matisse was already considered to be one of the two modern masters. During these years, often referred to as his ni?oise period, his work underwent great change. The most obvious transformation during this time was the reappearance of the figure in his painting. While Matisse's work would have developed regardless of his physical location, the environment he discovered in Nice influenced his work to a greater extent than any other location at any period in his career. He rejoiced in the light of southern France, introducing a broader range of soft tonalities to depict "harmonious, light-filled, and often profusely decorated interiors, with languorous and seductive models" (J. Elderfield, Henri Matisse: Masterworks from the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1996, p. 14). During a 1943 interview with the French poet Louis Aragon, Matisse expounded on his attachment to the region:
  
  Nice, why Nice? In my work, I have tried to create a translucent setting for the mind. I have found the necessary limpidity in several places around the world: New York, the South Pacific, and Nice... The painters over in New York say, How can anyone paint here, with this zinc-colored sky? But in fact it's wonderful! Everything becomes clear, translucent, exact, limpid. Nice, in this sense, has helped me. (Quoted in J. Flam, Matisse: A Retrospective, New York, 1988, pp. 166-167)
  
  During his time in Nice, much of Matisse's inspiration sprang from the actual rooms in which he worked. He painted Femme assise au livre ouvert in the winter of 1918-1919 in his room at the H?tel Méditerranée et la C?te d'Azur, located at 25, Promenade des Anglais (fig. 1). He first stayed at the H?tel Méditerranée in November of 1918 and returned to the familiar location for several years, each time taking a different room. While a significant improvement on his former lodgings at the H?tel Beau-Rivage, the H?tel Méditerranée was by no means extravagant and sat unobtrusively on the promenade, several blocks west of the Jetée Promenade. The hotel did, however, provide a fertile, expansive environment for his artistic experimentation and development. Matisse would later say of the hotel:
  
  An old and good hotel, of course! And what pretty Italian-style ceilings! What tiling! It was wrong to demolish the building. I stayed there four years [sic] for the pleasure of painting nudes and figures in an old rococo sitting room. Do you remember the light we had through the shutters? It came from below as if from theater footlights. Everything was fake, absurd, amazing, delicious. (Quoted in Cowart, op. cit., p. 24)
  
  The model in Femme assise au livre ouvert is eighteen-year-old Antoinette Arnoux, Matisse's favorite and most celebrated sitter during his early years in Nice. In the winter of 1918-1919, he executed a series of paintings with Antoinette reading leisurely. This variation of the subject, with Antoinette looking up at the viewer, distracted from her book, hints at the artist's changing relationship with his models. In his early work, Matisse used family members as subjects. With the use of hired models, "complicated plays of imagery, subtle eroticism, and autobiographical content increased" (ibid., p. 26). Matisse posed Antoinette in a variety of costumes and settings. Whether wearing a tasseled shawl, a voluminous striped robe, a ruffled blouse, or simply draped with a sheer cloth, she was usually portrayed as a soft, vulnerable young woman. In the present picture, Antoinette is dressed in a flamboyant, flower-print dress, one she is seen wearing in numerous works during the winter of 1918-1919, an example of which is Femme au chapeau fleuri (fig. 2).
  
  Matisse's first room at the H?tel Méditerranée, the setting for Femme assise au livre ouvert, had large windows overlooking the Baie des Anges. The double French doors with shutters opening onto a balcony provided an abundance of light, the key element in Matisse's work in Nice. Located in the center of the first or second floor of the hotel, the room was decorated in a nineteenth-century Italianate style, with ornate floral wallpaper, a geometrically tiled floor and partially transparent curtains. An oval mirror and a small, ordinary table were among the furnishings:
  
  The table, with its oval mirror and embroidered skirt, became an important compositional element for Matisse, and he began a faithful, almost poetic relationship with it. The table became the room's inhabitant, with or without the model, artist, or family member. In a manner consistent with his lifelong furnishing of paintings with personal decorative articles, Matisse seized this mirror and table and included it in his repertory of forms from 1918 until he left the H?tel Méditerranée et la C?te d'Azur at the end of the spring in 1921 (ibid., p. 24).

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Other paintings by Henri Matisse:

Naked in an Armchair

Girl's Torso

Still life - Pineapple, Lemons

Still Life, Flowers and Mug