Three Sisters and "The Rose Marble Table" (Les Trois soeurs à "La Table de marbre rose")

Discussion

FROM THE BARNES FOUNDATION’S CATALOG

The three works on this wall form a group of three paintings, known as a triptych. Although the group is commonly called the "Three Sisters Triptych," it is likely that only two sisters served as models for all nine figures in the paintings—an Italian woman named Laurette and her sister Anna. In the background of this work, Matisse depicted his own painting in progress, The Rose Marble Table (1917, Museum of Modern Art, New York). The painting-within-a-painting, which also resembles a window onto a garden, deliberately blurs the boundary between real and fictive space.

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