Nymph and Faun

In 1907 Matisse was the painter Paris argued about. His Blue Nude had gone down badly at the spring Independants, and he was turning out canvases of bodies in a landscape, quickly and on a small scale. This one he called Bathers. Four years later he put it into The Red Studio, the painting of his own workroom with his pictures set around the walls, so we know exactly where it stood among his things in 1911. He sold it in 1913. The Copenhagen businessman Christian Tetzen-Lund brought it to Denmark in 1919 and for a few years kept one of the largest Matisse collections anywhere. The name Nymph and Faun only attached itself in 1951. Denmark's national gallery bought the picture in 2018, having wanted it for more than 20 years.