River Landscape (La Berge)

Matisse painted this riverbank in 1907 at Collioure, the small port near the Spanish border where two summers earlier he and the painter Andre Derain had covered their canvases in raw, unmixed colour and startled Paris into calling them Fauves, wild beasts. By 1907 that first blaze had cooled. Cezanne had died the autumn before, and Matisse was studying him closely, like most younger painters in France, looking for a way to build a picture from solid blocks rather than pure flashes of colour. The riverbank shows him between the two. The greens and blues are still bright and loosely brushed, while the shapes sit firmer now, laid down in broad planes that keep their place on the bank.