Pastorale

Matisse painted this arcadian scene in 1905, the year a Paris critic walked into the Salon d'Automne, saw the raw unmixed colour of Matisse and his circle, and called them fauves, wild beasts. The name stuck to the whole movement. Here nude figures rest in a landscape that is no real place, a timeless pastoral put down in bold colour laid on almost straight from the tube, greens and pinks that answer each other rather than describe the light. It belongs to the same dream of leisure that runs through his large pictures of these years. Its later history is stranger than its subject. In 2010 it was one of five paintings lifted from its museum in Paris in a single night, and it has not been seen since.