This is the story of two women - one an orphan and refugee who finds a place in the studio of a famous French artist, the other a wife and mother who has stood by her husband for nearly forty years.

Amelie is first drawn to Henri Matisse as a way of escaping the conventional life expected of her. A free spirit and daughter of liberal parents, she sees in this budding young artist a glorious future for them both. Ambitious and driven, she gives everything for her husband's art, ploughing her own desires, her time, her money into sustaining them both, even through years of struggle and disappointment.

Lydia Delectorskaya is a young Russian emigree, who fled her homeland following the death of her mother. After a fractured childhood, she is trying to make a place for herself on France's golden Riviera, amid the artists, film stars and dazzling elite. Eventually she finds employment with the Matisse family.

From this point on, their lives are set on a collision course....

This is a story of drama and betrayal; emotion and sex; glamour and tragedy, all set in the hotbed of the 1930s art movement in France. In art, as in life, this a time when the rules were made to be broken...