Interior with Egyptian Curtain

Painted in 1948 and now in The Phillips Collection in Washington, 'Interior with Egyptian Curtain' is one of Matisse's final large oils, created while he was also producing the cut-outs that would dominate his last years. The painting shows the Mediterranean light of his Vence studio filtered through an Egyptian-patterned curtain, with a palm tree visible beyond the window and a bowl of fruit on the table inside. The contrast between the highly ornate curtain pattern and the plain exterior is a device Matisse had refined over decades of domestic interior painting. Duncan Phillips acquired this work directly; it remains one of the most celebrated paintings in his Washington collection. The vivid contrasts of pattern and plain colour, interior and exterior, artificial and natural, make this one of the most resolved statements of his late style, a synthesis of decorative and structural concerns pursued across six decades.

Matisse sets the densely patterned black-and-white curtain against the flat green of the exterior palm, creating an almost violent chromatic shock. The fruit on the table provides warm colour relief at the lower centre.