News — matisse

Above the hills of Vence, a short drive inland from the Côte d'Azur, stands a small white chapel with a blue-and-white tiled roof. From the road it looks modest, but inside is the work Henri Matisse called his masterpiece, made at the very end of his life. By the mid-1940s Matisse was in his seventies, frail after major surgery, and often working from bed or a wheelchair. He had settled in Vence, living at the Villa Le Rêve from 1943 to 1949. He was not known as a devout man, so the chapel project came about through an unexpected chain...