One conclusion we are likely to draw after visiting the major Matisse museums of the Northeast is how different an impression of the artist each of them yields. Whereas with most artists we can count on a certain predictability from museum to museum, that isn’t the case with Matisse. Each institution seems to have its own idea of who—or what—he is. One of these collections, the Cone Collection at the Baltimore Museum of Art, was given a new installation this summer. The collection and the two remarkable women who formed it are the subjects of a new study entitled Dr. Claribel and Miss Etta, by Brenda Richardson, assistant director for art at the museum, who also had charge of the re-installation.¹

The Cone Collection is notable for including two of Matisse’s most celebrated paintings, the Blue Nude (Souvenir de Biskra) of 1907, and the Large Reclining Nude of 1935, better known as the Pink Nude. But it is also the only American Matisse collection formed in the heroic days of modernism that remains intact and easily accessible today. Leo and Gertrude Stein’s collection, the first important private collection of modern art formed by Americans anywhere, had a surprisingly brief existence. When, in 1913, Leo moved out of the Paris apartment he shared with his sister Gertrude, he took most of their Matisses with him—a collection of nearly every important Fauve and post-Fauve painting—and immediately began to sell them. (Gertrude Stein’s share, mostly pictures by Picasso