Lydia Nikolaevna Délectorskaya (23 June 1910, Tomsk - 16 March 1998, Paris) was a Russian refugee and model best known for her collaboration with Henri Matisse from 1932 onwards.
[1][2][3] Born in the Siberian city of Tomsk, the only daughter of a pediatrician, Delectorskaya was orphaned at twelve, when both parents died in successive epidemics of typhus and cholera during the Civil War.
[4] The first paintings Matisse made of Lydia 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 modeled over a period of six months in 1935.
As his secretary, "Madame Lydia" made it possible for him to produce his final masterpieces in the face of his infirmity and failing health, which resulted in abstraction, a shift from oil paint on canvas to printing and paper, thus creating "a life's work" in Matisse's words.
Delectorskaya also 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.
The stained glass windows in the Chapelle du Rosaire in Vence, and the colored paper cutouts (Lydia had recruited female assistants to mix gouache paint to his instruction to cover the countless sheets of paper required) "now generally agreed to be among the greatest inventions of the 20th century.
There are more than 100 drawings and sketches for which Lydia modelled, and 90 paintings;[7] among them The Pink Nude, The Romanian Blouse, Woman in a Purple Coat, Blue Eyes, and Le Rêve.