This book has the best book cover of the year so far. Matisse-like shapes of bodies and flowers in pinks and oranges spread across a green background with the title in cream painted on and raised. It’s gorgeous.

The inside is not too bad either. Whilst this is fiction, it is based on research about Matisse’s life and the women in it. The main conflict is between the wife of Matisse, Amelie, and the woman who comes to help out but ends up staying and becoming his assistant/carer, Lydia. Matisse is asked to choose between the two women and chooses his wife but she can see he really wants Lydia and so she leaves him, separated but not divorced.

Lydia looks after Matisse until his dying day and then leaves the family home to live her own solitary life until in her late eighties. She was given pictures by Matisse and these she used to set up exhibitions and eventually donated them to a museum in Russia. She was Russian by birth, but having fled the country at the start of the revolution when Stalin came into power, she was never allowed back.

The book weaves together family life and the tensions it causes with creating art. Matisse was always honest about art having the greatest importance in his life and he really did live that life but at a great cost. At one point he has surgery for a stomach complaint which it turns out is cancerous, but with Lydia’s care he turns out some of his best art in almost a frenzy to make the most of this second life he has been given.

Second lives are important in the book: Amelie finds her purpose with the resistance during the war; Jean becomes important during the resistance having had a vapid life before and Lydia’s second life is spent helping Matisse and then her third life keeping his work alive in the mind of the public.

This is also another book where the women who might have been written out of his story are kept alive and central to the success of Matisse. The family’s view of Lydia is as a usurper

We can keep the details quiet. That woman is his hired help, nothing more. The only story that’ll be told about our father is about his art. Not the private affairs and melodramas of the women in the background.

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I was unclear whether Matisse had physical affairs with some of the women or whether they were the affairs that develop between artist and model when being observed so closely. Certainly one woman tried to kill herself as a result of this and so did Lydia, who tried to shoot herself in the heart when kicked out of the Matisse household.

Why is it that some artists were such difficult people to live with and unable to fully recognise the part a partner plays in their success? I think Haydock shows well how the women in his life supported and encouraged Matisse but it was often at their own expense.