Das Boulespiel

Three boys play a game of boules on a bare green slope, reduced to a few flat colours and simple curved outlines. Matisse painted this in Paris in 1908, and the players are thought to be his own two sons and a nephew, though he has stripped away nearly every particular that would let you recognise them. It belongs to a run of pictures he made around then of figures at ease in an open, timeless landscape, a private golden age. The reason it now hangs in St Petersburg rather than Paris comes down to one man: Sergei Shchukin, a Moscow textile merchant who was buying new Matisses by the roomful in these years. His collection was taken into public hands after the 1917 revolution, and this canvas passed with it eventually to the Hermitage.