A picture of jealous rivalry: Madame Matisse, by Sophie Haydock, reviewed
‘Your muse or your wife’ is quite the ultimatum to throw at an artist. But that was the choice Henri Matisse faced in 1939 when his wife of 30 years (you might know her as ‘Woman with a Hat’, 1905) had had enough of Lydia Delectorskaya (‘The Pink Nude’, 1935). It’s a dilemma which forms the crux of Sophie Haydock’s deliciously immersive novel about these two extraordinary women. A former journalist, Haydock is making it her mission to breathe life into women whose faces we know from famous artworks. Her gripping 2022 debut, The Flames, animated the tangled tales of the women who stripped naked for the troubled German artist
