Luxury I

In 1907 Matisse was 37 and two years past the room at the Salon d'Automne that got his circle the name Fauves, the wild beasts. For this canvas, over two metres tall, he used a method an old workshop would have recognised. He drew the three figures full size on paper, pricked holes along the outlines and dusted charcoal through them onto the canvas, so the design arrived already fixed and the colour could go on thin, flat and fast. In places the paint is so lean that the weave shows through. What it shows is a bather standing at the edge of the water with two women attending her, one of them kneeling with an armful of flowers. He painted the whole composition again the following year, more tightly drawn and more evenly coloured, and that second version is in Copenhagen.