Jardin du Luxembourg

Matisse painted several views of the Luxembourg Gardens around 1901, and this is one of them. He was in his early thirties, poor, with a young family, and years away from the colour explosion that would get him branded a wild beast in 1905. Already, though, he was pulling away from the flickering touch of the Impressionists and laying the park down in broad, deliberate slabs of colour, the trees and paths simplified almost to flat shapes. The Moscow collector Sergei Shchukin later bought it, which is how a Paris park ended up in Saint Petersburg. There is little fine detail and a lot of weight in the way the greens sit against each other.