In 1934, Etta Cone visited Henri Matisse in Nice and purchased the painting Interior with Dog. Two years later, she received a small preparatory drawing for the painting, with a special inscription in the lower left corner: “à Miss Etta Cone/respecteusement/Henri Matisse/June ‘36.” Matisse knew that Etta appreciated drawings and had an instinctive understanding of their role in the creative process. Etta was curious about how Matisse arrived at his compositions and recognized that he relied on drawing to help him formulate ideas for his paintings. The small study that Matisse sent to Etta in 1936 provides a telescoped view of still life objects arranged on a table. The artist paid close attention to the decorative pattern on the large vase, but gave no suggestion of the surrounding room, its dimensions, the details of the floor, or the wall surface that appear in the final painting. Thirty-five years later in 1971, Pierre Matisse, the artist’s son, donated a second drawing related to Interior with Dog in memory of the Cone sisters. It is likely that the two studies were made at the same time in 1934, although determining their sequence is not possible. In this study, the still life on the table is given less attention with only a cursory treatment of the vase and book. However the longer view into the room emphasizes the curving shape of the table legs and allows us to experience the room as a dimensional space. Blocks of different decorative patterns contrast with the more regular hexagonal design of the tiled floor. The leaves of the magnolia, which spread out magnificently in the final painting, are still severely cropped. Art historian Jack Flam states in Matisse in the Cone Collection: The Poetics of Vision, “Only when we look at the different views of the room in the drawings and the painting can we reconstruct what the room actually looked like. Although based on a real place, Interior with Dog is an imaginative reinvention of it.”