Still Life with African Statuette

One afternoon in the autumn of 1906 Matisse stopped in a curio shop on the rue de Rennes in Paris and bought a small carved wooden figure from the Congo, a Vili statuette, for a few francs. That same evening he carried it to Gertrude Stein's apartment and showed it to Picasso, who could not put it down. Historians often mark that visit as one of the moments African sculpture entered modern European art. The next year Matisse painted the little figure into this still life, standing among cloth and fruit, its dark carved body set against the bare white of the canvas and a charge of red. It is the only time an African object appears so plainly in his painting, the one he bought first still in the picture.