The bay of Saint-Tropez

Matisse spent the summer of 1904 in Saint-Tropez as the guest of Paul Signac, six years older, comfortably off, and the leading theorist of the neo-Impressionists, the painters who built a picture out of separate touches of unmixed colour. Matisse came down in mid July with his family and stayed until September. What he painted there is domestic. His wife Amélie and their younger son Pierre are having an afternoon snack on the shore with the gulf behind them. Back in Paris that winter he reworked the same figures and the same bay into a far larger canvas, Luxe, calme et volupté, where the colour comes apart into small separate strokes. Signac bought that big painting himself and hung it in the dining room of his house above Saint-Tropez.