Still Life with Asphodels

Matisse probably painted this at the beginning of 1907, at Collioure on the Mediterranean. In October of the same year Karl Ernst Osthaus, a wealthy patron who had opened a museum of his own, the Folkwang, in the German town of Hagen, bought it from the Paris dealers Bernheim-Jeune. The Folkwang today counts it as the first Matisse to enter any museum. That December the painter had a show of seven canvases there. On a plain tabletop a dark green jug of asphodels stands among patterned pottery, with a pipe resting on a plate at the right and a flat violet wall behind. In 1937, when the Nazi purge of so-called degenerate art stripped the collection, by then in Essen, of most of its modern works, this canvas stayed. Four years later the poet Gottfried Benn wrote a few lines about it, asphodels offered to Proserpina, queen of the dead.