Three Bathers

In December 1907, only months after it was painted, Matisse sold this canvas straight from his studio to a young German couple, the painter Oskar Moll and his wife Greta, who had come to Paris that year. Early the next year the Molls were among the handful of people who helped him open a school of his own, the Académie Matisse, and they went on to build one of the first serious Matisse collections in Germany. The picture is a smaller, earthier relative of Bathers with a Turtle, the large canvas he finished in 1908. Here the shore is still a real beach, orange and red under a blue sea with sailing boats, and the women have cloths and drapes to sit on. Its later travels were less settled. In December 1940, in occupied Paris, it was sold at the Hôtel Drouot auction house, and in 1950 the Minneapolis collector Putnam Dana McMillan bought it for $10,000, leaving it to the museum in 1961.