FINANCIAL REVIEW
By Jan Dalley
In 1941, when Henri Matisse was recovering from cancer surgery, his advertisement for "a young and pretty nurse" was answered by Monique Bourgeois. An unusual friendship grew, and several years later, when Bourgeois had entered the order of Dominican nuns at Vence, in the south of France, she asked the 77-year-old Matisse for help in designing a chapel that the nuns wanted to build for their school.
The result, the Chapelle du Rosaire, finished in 1951, is a small, white, L-shaped building whose fiercely plain interior is flooded by glorious light from Matisse's stained-glass windows, created in just three colours – blue, yellow, green – that evoke the Mediterranean setting. [
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| Chapelle du Rosaire, by Henri Matisse (completed in 1951). Alamy |
