Japonaise: Woman beside the Water

In the summer of 1905 Matisse took his family to Collioure, a small fishing port on the French Mediterranean close to the Spanish border, and asked the younger painter Andre Derain to come down and work beside him. They stayed about three months. That autumn their pictures hung together at the Salon d'Automne in Paris, in the room a critic nicknamed the cage of wild beasts. This is one of the smallest things Matisse brought back from the coast. The woman at the water's edge is his wife Amelie, and she is held together by a few pencil strokes under loose patches of pink, orange and green, with bare canvas left showing between them. The whole painting is about 35 centimetres tall.