Luxe, calme et volupté

In the summer of 1904 Matisse went south to Saint-Tropez on the Mediterranean coast and worked beside Paul Signac, the leading figure of Neo-Impressionism, who painted in small separate dots of pure colour. This picture is Matisse trying that method on. A group of nude bathers rests on the shore with a picnic cloth, boats on the water behind them, the whole surface built from short bright dabs of orange, pink, green and blue that your eye is meant to blend. The title is a line lifted from a Baudelaire poem about escaping to a place of luxury, calm and pleasure, and Signac liked the result enough to buy it. But look closely and you can feel Matisse straining against the tidy dot system. His marks are already broader and more wilful than Signac's, the colour louder than the scene needs. Within a year he would drop the dots and let colour run free, and this beach scene is usually pointed to as the last step before Fauvism, the movement he was about to launch.