From 1916 Nice became increasingly central to Matisse's working life, and the paintings he made there are dominated by a recurring theme: the interior, usually including a female figure, singly or in small groups, set among patterned fabric, screens and cut flowers^[1]. Still life and muted landscape also feature heavily in this period, but it is the combination of figure and ornament, worked and reworked across dozens of small-scale canvases, that defines the era^[1]. Robert Hughes singled out Matisse's 1924 painting Anemones in an Earthenware Vase as an example of how far this late colour sense could go, describing a composition as lucid as a theorem in structure, built from pinks, carmines, chromes and lilacs held together by a harmony that made an otherwise disorienting palette feel entirely natural^[3].

Matisse pushed back directly against the idea that his Nice-period paintings looked improvised or dashed off. In one recorded exchange, when a sceptical interviewer suggested his work seemed hurried, Matisse produced fifty drawings made in preparation for a single portrait to prove otherwise, alongside separate studies of movement and composition^[2]. The apparent ease of the finished paintings, their loose contours and soft colour harmonies, sat on top of a working method built from sustained, repeated observation rather than spontaneity.

In a 1919 interview with the Danish critic Ragnar Hoppe, Matisse described his current work as a deliberate search rather than a retreat. He said he had worked first as an impressionist, directly from nature, then sought concentration and more intense expression through line and colour, sacrificing depth and detail along the way, and that he now wanted to combine both approaches into what he called a new synthesis^[2]. He framed the shift toward subdued, neutral tones in some of this work as a kind of hygiene, a deliberate discipline to keep his eye and his instincts fresh rather than settle into mannerism^[2].