Femme au violon

Painted in 1922 and held in the Jean Walter-Paul Guillaume Collection (now Musée de l'Orangerie), 'Femme au violon' (Woman with Violin) belongs to the Nice-period works in which Matisse returned repeatedly to the theme of music-making in domestic interiors. The violin had personal significance — Matisse played the instrument himself as a way of training his ear and sense of rhythm — and female musicians appear across his career from the 1900s forward. In the early 1920s he was working in the luxuriously furnished apartments of his Nice hotels and rented rooms, filling canvases with figures surrounded by decorative fabrics, open windows, and musical instruments. The Orangerie's Walter-Guillaume collection is one of the richest concentrations of his Nice-period work outside the Hermitage. The Orangerie's Walter-Guillaume collection offers an unrivalled concentration of Nice-period Matisse works, allowing the odalisques and interiors to be studied as a sustained decade-long investigation.

Matisse renders the violin as both a musical object and a formal shape — its curves rhyming with those of the female figure holding it. The decorative setting of the Nice interior provides a richly textured context, with patterned fabrics and filtered light typical of this period.