Suffused with the light of Le Midi, Femme assise sur un balcon presents a quintessential example of Henri Matisse’s acclaimed Nice-period paintings. After moving to the coastal French town in 1917, Matisse devoted himself to an array of interior scenes featuring models set against open windows, awash in brilliant pattern and sunlight.

In November 1918, Matisse took his first room at the Hotel Méditerranée et de la Cote d’Azur (see fig. 1). While the artist traveled frequently throughout Europe around this t.mes , he returned to Nice each autumn, lodging at the Hotel Méditerranée for the next three years. The artist enjoyed the expansive hotel for its Italian-style ceilings, old rococo decor and sunlit interiors. As Jack Cowart writes, "This hotel would become for Matisse a most fertile, expansive environment… His first room had shuttered, double French doors opening out onto a balcony with a carved or cast balustrade.... Models were chosen to pose on the balcony, holding brightly colored red, green, or orange umbrellas. These parasols not only shaded them from the sun but also provided a soft irradiation of colored light that Matisse would capture on canvas" (Exh. Cat., Washington D.C., National Gallery of Art, Henri Matisse: The Early Years in Nice 1916-1930, 1986-87, p. 24).

By the fall of 1920, Matisse had once again returned to his favorite accommodation in the southern city. Here, his newest room was appointed with decorative wallpapers, fine furnishings and sweeping French doors which opened onto a terrace—a notable improvement over the balcony-less suite he occupied earlier in the year. The large windows in his latest room overlooked the bay, providing unfettered views to the water which would serve as endless inspiration for Matisse and inform the paintings which followed.

Though balconies and windows would remain a crucial theme in Matisse’s work throughout the Nice years, the motif of the woman with parasol in such a setting was first suggested circa 1918-19 in his Femme au balcon à l'ombrelle verte (see fig. 2). In a little over a year, Matisse’s style would shift dramatically under the influence of the Mediterranean light, as exemplified by the contrast between the related composition and the present work from 1920-21 (see fig. 3). Memorialized the creation of Femme assise sur un balcon, Matisse wrote about the present work in a letter to his his wife Amélie dated to 24 December 1920, stating: “In the morning, I made a small painting, the model with the Spanish flowered shawl and the green parasol on the balcony."

Whereas the 1919 picture retains the solidity and geometry of Matisse’s earlier Cubist-inspired works like Les Demoiselles à la rivière (see fig. 4), the present composition is enlivened by the artist's lighter, more directional facture. While the elements of the two compositions are closely aligned, in Femme assise sur un balcon, Matisse shifts his perspective and skews the parasol, creating the illusion of viewing the sitter from both above and below. In the present work, Matisse depicts the balustrade at an angle, elongating the exterior expanse within the composition; by contrast, the earlier painting reiterated the right angles of the window frame, confining the sitter within the space. By eliminating most of the interior foreground in Femme assise sur un balcon, Matisse endows the present work with an enhanced sense of airiness and luminosity provided by the coastal setting. Femme assise sur un balcon is further invigorated by the movement within the entirety of the composition, notable in the dappled waves and billowing palms behind the sitter, as well as in the decorative print of her dress.

In these dichotomous interior-exterior scenes Matisse combines the greatest attributes of each setting, from the decorative patterns and architecture of the hotel, to the natural beauty if the landscape, paying tribute to the luminous and leisurely atmosphere of the Mediterranean city. The playwright Charles Vildrac spoke of his visit to Matisse’s studio during this t.mes : “I went to see Matisse once in that room in Nice which looks out on the promenade and on the sea and which he has left since. I knew most of the paintings that he painted there these last years. Therefore I found the high window and its curtains, the red rug and its decoration, the 'toad' armchair in which Matisse often placed the nude model. or which he put. empty, dose to the window, adorning this affable and plump chair with a lace antimacassar: I recognized the decorated porcelain vase and the lacquered dressing table with the oval mirror: Without a doubt. I found myself in the room ‘of the Matisse paintings’” (Exh. Cat., Washington D.C., National Gallery of Art, Henri Matisse: The Early Years in Nice 1916-1930, 1986-87, p. 26).

Years later, Matisse would later recall the his fond memories of the hotel after its redevelopment, "An old and good hotel, for sure ! And what beautiful Italian ceilings! What tiles! They were wrong to demolish the building. I stayed there for four years for the pleasure of painting nudes and figures in an old rococo salon. Do you remember the light that came through the shutters? It came from below like a theatre ramp. Everything was fake, absurd, amazing, delicious" (Henri Matisse in Art News Annual, 1952, quoted in Henri Matisse, Écrits et propos sur l’art, Paris, Hermann, 1971, p. 123.

The model in the present work is likely Antoinette Arnoud, who posed for Matisse in works like Les Plumes blanches (see fig. 5) as well as an array of related balcony scenes during his winters in Nice. She is depicted here as the dominant figure within the composition, filling the pictorial field as she gently leans on the balustrade, gazing at the scenery below. The concentration on his model and the attention that Matisse pays in rendering the elegant florals of her dress illustrates his life-long fascination with pattern and bravura skill in harmonizing bold colors and designs.

Discussing his painting of this period Matisse affirmed the importance of his models, writing: "My models, human figures, are never just 'extras' in an interior. They are the principal theme in my work. I depend entirely on my model, whom I observe at liberty, and then I decide on the pose which best suits her nature. When I take a new model, I intuit the pose that will best suit her from her un-self-conscious attitudes of repose, and then I become the slave of that pose. I often keep those girls several years, until my interest is exhausted. My plastic signs probably express their souls (a word I dislike), which interests me subconsciously, or what else is there? Their forms are not always perfect, but they are expressive. The emotional interest aroused in me by them does not appear particularly in the representation of their bodies, but often rather in the lines or the special values distributed over the whole canvas or paper, which form its complete orchestration, its architecture" (quoted in Ernst Gerhard Güse, Henri Matisse, Drawings and Sculpture, Munich, 1991, p. 22).

A feat of Matisse's early Nice period, Femme assise sur un balcon is an exceptional example of the luminous interior and studio scenes which would come to define the body of work inspired by his t.mes along the Mediterranean coast. Held in the same family collects ion for nearly 100 years, the present work was acquired from businessman, collects or and philanthropist Samuel A. Lewisohn in 1929, and comes to auction for the very first t.mes .