The summer of 1942 was a bleak moment in World War II. The German Army had the Russian city of Leningrad locked under siege and was eyeing Stalingrad. The Japanese had followed their surprise attack on Pearl Harbor with victories in Singapore, Malaya, and the Philippines. Paris and most of northern France were in their third summer under Nazi occupation, and the collaborationist Vichy government ruled over the south of the country.
The gloom of war hung over the ancient port of Nice, bounded by the Alps, the Mediterranean Sea, and Fascist Italy, just as it did over France’s greatest modernist painter, Henri Matisse, who made the city his adopted home. At 72, he had evaded death the previous winter with an abdominal surgery that left him unable to stand at an easel. Despite his pain and friends’ entreaties to seek safety—he was offered a teaching post in San Francisco and had a visa to Rio de Janeiro—he defiantly remained in France, intent on keeping up his rigorous art regimen, even if it meant sitting up in bed to sketch.
