Olive Trees at Collioure

Matisse spent the spring of 1906 travelling in Algeria, and by the summer he was back in Collioure, the Mediterranean fishing port near the Spanish border where he had worked the year before. Olive trees grew on the slopes around the town, and here are two of them, their trunks and branches drawn in dark strokes, set among patches of pink, violet, yellow and green that have little to do with the colours of a real grove. The Met gives the date as summer 1906, with a question mark.

What is certain is how quickly it found a buyer. That autumn Leo Stein, the American collector who lived in Paris with his sister Gertrude, bought it for their apartment. Where it went after the Steins is not documented. It turned up again in Paris in 1949, when the New York banker Robert Lehman acquired it, and it came to the Met with his collection in 1975.