5 September 2017

moorish screen

Matisse in the Studio shows how the things he loved inspired his painting. He wrote in 1940: ‘I have at last found the object for which I’ve been longing for a whole year. It’s a Venetian baroque chair, silver gilt with tinted varnish like a piece of enamel.  When I found it in an antique shop, a few weeks ago I was bowled over. It’s splendid. I’m obsessed with it.’ The exhibition recreates a set he would have recognised since everything in it was his: a large, nineteenth-century screen on the back wall, a small, eight-sided ornate painted table known as a guéridon from Algeria, and a Moroccan chair. The Moorish Screen (1921) hangs nearby.