“I am incapable of making a slavish copy of Nature. Instead I feel compelled to interpret it, and adapt it to the spirit of the picture. When I put colours together they have to join in a living chord or harmony of colour.” -Henri Matisse

Nature too is simplified into repeated motifs of plants, flowers and fruits, but these are not static still-life’s, instead the organic forms fill the page, alive and vibrant. During Matisse's later years, from about 1948, the artist was aging and in ill health. Although he was unable to paint in the traditional manner due to his condition, he did not allow this to stifle his creativity. Instead, he continued his work by what he called ‘drawing with scissors’, cutting out shapes of coloured paper and pinning them to the wall of his studio. ‘There is no gap between my earlier pictures and my cut-outs’, Matisse wrote, ‘I have only reached a form reduced to the essential through greater absoluteness and greater abstraction’.