Painter's Family

Matisse painted this in 1911 in his house at Issy, outside Paris, and it was already promised to a buyer far away: Sergei Shchukin, a Moscow textile merchant quietly filling his mansion with the newest French painting. The room is Matisse's own. His two sons bend over a game of draughts, his daughter Marguerite stands at the left, his wife Amélie sits sewing. But everyone is pressed flat into the same red field of pattern as the carpet and the wallpaper, so the family reads almost like one more ornament in the room. Shchukin hung it in Moscow. After the revolution his collection was seized by the state, and that is how the painting reached the Hermitage.