Nasturtiums with the Painting "Dance" I

In 1912 Matisse painted this in his studio at Issy-les-Moulineaux, just outside Paris, and he painted his own work into it. The tall canvas on the wall is the left half of Dance, the great ring of figures he'd finished three years earlier. In front of it he sets a wooden chair, a sculptor's tripod stand, and a jar of nasturtiums trailing their round leaves. He lets the tripod's leg run straight across the edge of Dance, so the room and the painting inside it collapse into one flat field of colour. A year later the canvas crossed the Atlantic. It hung in the 1913 Armory Show in New York, the exhibition that introduced modern European art to America, and travelled on to Chicago and Boston, where Matisse's work drew more ridicule than almost anything else on the walls. There are two versions of this scene. The other one is in Moscow, painted at the same easel.