The Dinner Table

In February 1897 the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris opened a room of Impressionist paintings left to the state by Gustave Caillebotte, a painter who had also collected his friends' work. Some 40 pictures by Monet, Degas, Renoir, Pissarro and others now hung together in a national museum, over loud objections from academic painters such as Jean-Léon Gérôme.

That spring Matisse, 27 and still a student in the studio of the painter Gustave Moreau, sent this large canvas to the Salon of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. It was meant as his first major statement. A maid leans over a laid table to arrange flowers among carafes, glasses and bowls of fruit, painted with a luminosity that has often been compared to Renoir's. Many members of the society disliked it, and Moreau stood up for it. Matisse came back to the same subject 11 years later, a woman at a laid table, in Harmony in Red, now in the Hermitage.