"Nude reclining" is an exquisite painting by Henri Matisse who is known for both his use of color and his fluid and original draughtsman-ship.
Matisse painted this charming composition in 1919 at his studio in Nice. Throughout the war he had swum against the tide of the Parisian avant-garde, committing himself to a style of painting that was grounded in form and color, but in early 1919 his determination was at its most strident: "Work monopolized him from the start," writes Hilary Spurling of this period. "Throughout the first months of 1919, he complained that the road lay uphill, that he was toiling like a carthorse, that his labors exhausted him and made him despair. But he had no doubt that he was on to something. ‘As for telling you what it will be like,' he wrote to his wife on 9th January 1919, 'that I couldn't say since it hasn't happened yet, but my idea is to push further and deeper into true painting
