Annelies, White Tulips, and Anemones, Henri Matisse

Henri Matisse (French, 1869–1954)

Annelies, White Tulips, and Anemones, 1944

Oil on canvas

Gift of the Friends of the Academy, 1946 (376.1)

In Annelies, White Tulips, and Anemones, Henri Matisse has fabricated a private world of calm, repose, grace, and ease, domesticating the sensual and decorative pastoral themes of his earlier paintings. To create these sumptuous interiors, Matisse worked with a succession of favorite models; in this case, the sitter is Annelies, a young woman whom Matisse took on as a student. The luxurious and safe haven Matisse imagines in this work bears no hint of the turmoil in his personal life at the time: in the spring of 1944, his wife and daughter, who had been working for the French Resistance, were taken prisoner by the Nazis.