Henri Matisse — Interior with a Woman

The setting is a room at the Hôtel Méditerranée in Nice, where Matisse was staying. The seated woman remains unidentified, but the one standing is believed to be his daughter Marguerite. The overall palette, built from thin, watercolor-like pigments, marks a transitional moment in Matisse's style—the shift, in the 1920s, away from his earlier Cubist-inflected painting toward something new. A window appears again here too, the recurring motif of his Nice years and the device he valued most for linking interior and exterior space.