Landscape at Collioure

In the summer of 1904 Matisse had painted at Saint-Tropez beside Paul Signac, the leading Neo-Impressionist, who built his pictures out of small, even dots of pure colour. A year later, working in Collioure, a fishing port near the Spanish border, Matisse let that discipline fall apart. The touches here are still separate, but they have stretched into dashes, commas and long flicks of green, blue and pink, some squeezed straight from the tube. He painted on canvas that had not been primed and left whole patches of it bare, so the pale weave of the cloth shows between the trees. The picture is small, about 39 by 47 centimetres, and the museum counts it as a finished work. John Elderfield, the Matisse scholar and longtime curator at the Museum of Modern Art, called that summer's landscapes wilder and more reckless than anything Matisse painted later. The painting came to the museum in 1990 from the collector Louise Reinhardt Smith, partly as a gift and partly by bequest.