A Room with a View to Music: Henri Matisse’s Interior with a Violin Case
The first Matisse painting bought by MoMA’s cofounder shows the artist’s fusion of color, light, sea, and music.
Ann Temkin
Jan 13, 2025
In Interior with a Violin Case (as is true for many of Henri Matisse’s paintings), music is present despite being absent. Here, doubly absent: not only because of the obvious fact that a painting is silent, but because a painting’s usual sign for music—a musical instrument or performer—is absent too. Music comes to mind only as our gaze reaches the upholstered armchair at left, an empty violin case perched atop it.
Matisse made the painting in his room at the Hôtel Mediterranée in the city of Nice, overlooking the bay. Nice, where he first arrived at the end of 1917, offered a welcome refuge from Parisian pressures of fame and family; now 50, Matisse was delighted to feel like a stranger in the south, and to be distanced from the reverberations of World War I and its aftermath. Most of all, Nice offered him the sublime color and light of the Mediterranean. When he had first encountered that sky and sea on a visit to Corsica in 1898, Matisse had written ecstatically of a blue so delicious “you could eat it.”

Henri Matisse. Interior with a Violin Case. Nice, winter 1918–19. Oil on canvas, 28 3/4 × 23 5/8" (73 × 60 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Lillie P. Bliss Collection. © 2025 Succession H. Matisse/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Henri Matisse. Music (Sketch). Collioure, spring-summer 1907.
Blue plays a key role in Interior with a Violin Case, both in the view outside the window (a Mark Rothko painting 30 years early), and in the cloth lining of the upper and lower interiors of the violin case. And as light pours through the window, soft blue recasts the stone balustrade, the pink tile floor, and the white table covering. The rhyming of deep blue between the violin case and the vista beyond the window is no accident: for Matisse, music represented the same balm for the spirit and source of joy as sea and sky. He himself was a devoted violinist, following in the footsteps of the great 19th-century French painter Jean-Dominique-Auguste Ingres (1780–1867), whose passion for playing violin was so well known that the French idiom violon d’Ingres signifies a beloved hobby. Matisse’s small sketch Music (1907), first owned by brother-and-sister collectors Leo and Gertrude Stein, and now in MoMA’s collection, portrays the painting’s musician as a violinist.
During his first months in Nice, Matisse played the violin daily, a regimen he signaled in only one painting: Le Violoniste à la fenêtre [Violinist at the Window] of spring 1918. As in Music, the musician’s role as surrogate for the artist is characteristic of Matisse’s general preference for representing himself and his vocation indirectly or only in principle, rather than in the specifics of a self-portrait.
Interior with a Violin Case is the first painting by Matisse that Lillie P. Bliss, one of MoMA’s founders, purchased; she bought it from Kraushaar Gallery in New York City, in 1927, eight years after it was made. We do not know what she thought of Matisse, generally speaking, but it is tempting to speculate that the violin case is what drew her to this painting. Bliss was a talented pianist and an avid devotee of classical music; her earliest philanthropy had focused on musical performance and education. Matisse’s connection between the two arts in his painting certainly would have resonated with a woman whose passion for modern art was always intertwined with her love of music: In the penthouse apartment she built for herself near the end of her life, it was the Music Room, complete with grand piano, that housed her collection of paintings.

Henri Matisse. Le Violoniste à la fenêtre. Spring 1918. Oil and paint on canvas. Centre Pompidou. © 2025 Succession H. Matisse/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Interior with a Violin Case is part of the exhibition Lillie P. Bliss and the Birth of the Modern, on view at MoMA through March 29, 2025.
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