The Geranium

This canvas had a busy first two years. Matisse painted it in 1906, and in March 1907 the Paris dealers Bernheim-Jeune bought it from him. That autumn it hung in Berlin, at the gallery of Paul Cassirer, and in the spring of 1908 it travelled to Moscow for the Golden Fleece salon, a show of new French painting put on by a Russian art magazine. By October 1908 it belonged to the German painter Oskar Moll and his wife Greta, also a painter, who earlier that year had helped set up Matisse's teaching studio in Paris. The picture itself is a still life of a potted geranium with a jug and red vegetables on a table. The two pale figures near the pot are Matisse's own small sculptures, probably shown as plaster casts, and bronze versions of both now belong to the same museum in Chicago.