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Toward the end of his life, Henri Matisse designed a small chapel for Dominican nuns in the town of Vence in southern France ? the Chapelle du Rosaire de Vence. He worked on it from 1946 to 1951 and considered the product his masterpiece.
Already weak and moving about in a wheelchair, Matisse undertook the work upon the request of a Dominican nun, who before she entered the convent had served years earlier as his nurse when he was recovering from a serious operation. When Matisse finished the project, he was already well into his eighties.
Matisse designed every aspect of the chapel, its architecture, its stained glass windows, its interior furnishings, its murals, and the vestments of the priest.
The artist spent a great deal of time on the stained glass windows. All three of them make use of just three colors: yellow, green and blue ? yellow for the sun, green for vegetation, and blue for the sea, sky and the Madonna. ?Tree of Life? is the name given to the two stained glass windows that occupy the west wall beside the altar. They portray yellow leaves and blue raindrops floating in a green world. The light from the windows floods the interior of the chapel, giving it a mysterious, kaleidoscopic glow, replicating across the plain stone altar their raindrop and leaf motif.
The leaves in the stained-glass windows have a common form, hence a common source ? a tree typical of the place.
?Learn a lesson from the fig tree,? said Jesus. ?When its branch becomes tender and sprouts leaves, you know that summer is near.?
Jesus, Mark wrote, was referring to the denouement of time, when the Son of Man would come in the clouds with great power and glory. Which would ensue after great tribulations, after the sun and the moon had lost their light and the stars and the heavenly bodies had gone out of control. When we see these things happening ? just as we should deduce the coming of summer from the fig tree?s branch becoming inflamed and growing leaves ? we should know that the conclusion of everything is in the neighborhood.
When one looks at Matisse?s ?Tree of Life? one senses in the two tall and beautifully arched windows the presence of summer ? God?s summer, the summer that arrives with the Son of Man?s coming in glory. The yellow petioles and blue water drops drift in green space, which has zero gravity, in which one can move with quickness and ease as befitting a glorified body.
The yellow background can only suggest heaven, which is the quintessence of brightness, which bursts into the world with the yellow fronds of life.
The writer John Russell wrote about the chapel and its windows:
?Matisse fills an interior space with wraiths of color, phantoms of yellow and green and blue, constantly in motion. Even the glass itself has an incorporeal quality. The Chapel is just this side of having no physical existence at all; it is not the expression of a great artist at play, but of a great man halfway to paradise.?
?Halfway to paradise? is apt. Because Matisse drapes his stained glass design with what seems like a piece of fabric, a veil pinned to the topmost corners of each of the window?s arches.
It is as though Matisse is saying that time shrouds eternity, but, through the veil of years, months, weeks, days and hours, which blur our vision of God and may prevent us from directing ourselves to Him, God gives us a glimpse of an endless summer that, despite disasters, upheavals and cataclysms ? both within and outside of us ? will ultimately be ours, if we but believe and hold fast.
And, as Matisse describes every drawing and study he made while working on the chapel, our every fresh effort towards faith and faithfulness for the sake of the bright world that lies beyond the veil can only be ?like a prayer one says better each time".
