Rosa Zwiebeln

In 1923 a Copenhagen engineer named Johannes Rump offered his collection of modern French painting to the Danish national gallery, and the director, Karl Madsen, turned it down as not good enough. The collection held about 25 works by Matisse, this still life of onions among them. Matisse painted it across 1906 and 1907, the years just after the Fauve room at the Salon d'Automne had made his colour notorious in Paris, when he was flattening his pictures down to plain colour and outline. Rump kept at it, and the museum took the gift in 1928. Those paintings still make up the bulk of the Matisse collection in Copenhagen, one of the largest anywhere outside France.