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.
