La route

Matisse spent the early part of 1919 in Nice, before leaving for Issy-les-Moulineaux for the summer and returning to Nice in the autumn. He was greatly inspired by the atmosphere of the south, which he described as more 'silvered' than that of the Touraine, and his depictions of the landscape around Nice provide testament to the artist's obsession with light and its compositional influence. As he wrote to Camoin the previous year, 'I have worked all this time in full sunlight from ten o'clock to noon and I subsequently found myself exhausted for the rest of the day. I am going to change my hours. Tomorrow I'll start at six-thirty or seven - I think I can have one or maybe two hours of work. The olive trees are so beautiful at this hour... A little while ago, I took my nap under an olive tree and what I saw was of a color and a softness of relationships that was truly moving. It seems as though it is a paradise that one does not have the right to analyze, however one is a painter, God damn it. Ah! Nice is a beautiful place! What a gentle and soft light in spite of its brightness!' (quoted in exh. cat. Henri Matisse, The early years in Nice 1916-1930, Washington D.C. 1986, p. 23).