13 Facts About Lydia Delectorskaya

Lydia Nikolaevna Delectorskaya was a Russian refugee and model best known for her collaboration with Henri Matisse from 1932 onwards.

Lydia Delectorskaya wanted to become a medical doctor, and was accepted in the medical faculty of the Sorbonne, but the high fees charged to foreign students were out of reach and she ended up a penniless exile in Nice.

The first paintings Matisse made of Lydia Delectorskaya combined the phenomenal virtuosity that had cost him so many years to perfect with his original instinctive ability to compose spontaneously in color.

Matisse's son Pierre told his father that he had renewed himself as a painter with Pink Nude, for which Lydia Delectorskaya modeled over a period of six months in 1935.

Lydia Delectorskaya was 25, Matisse 65, and with Matisse having an avuncular attitude to the young woman, she wrote:.

Lydia Delectorskaya could have run an army, she had amazing capacities.

Lydia Delectorskaya ran the studio, she organised the models, she dealt with the dealers, sales people, the gallery.

Lydia Delectorskaya was his great muse, model, manager and companion, staying by his side for the rest of his life.

Lydia Delectorskaya coordinated the four years of preparation and installation that went into the chapel at Vence, just outside Nice, which he flooded with blue and yellow light.

Matisse gifted valuable paintings to Lydia Delectorskaya, providing for her future.

Lydia Delectorskaya made at least 90 paintings of her.

Lydia Delectorskaya died aged 87, in Paris on 16 March 1998.

Lydia Delectorskaya's grave is in the cemetery in Pavlovsk, Saint Petersburg.