Ninfa y sátiro

Matisse's own title for this was a faun surprising a nymph, and the subject goes back to Pan's chase after the nymph Syrinx. Sergei Shchukin, a Moscow textile merchant, bought it and hung it in his family house on Znamensky Lane, where anyone could come and look on Sundays.

After 1918 the collection was nationalised, and it ended up in the State Museum of New Western Art in Moscow. In March 1948 a government decree shut that museum down, its holdings condemned as formalist. What survived was split between Moscow and Leningrad. This canvas went to the Hermitage and stayed in storage there until the mid-1950s.

The two bodies are laid over flat fields of colour, a yellow-green plane of ground in front and soft hills behind.