Autoportrait au tricot rayé

In the autumn of 1905 a Paris critic walked into a room hung with paintings by Matisse and his friends, saw the raw colour, and called them les fauves, the wild beasts. The name stuck. A year later Matisse painted himself as one of them. He wears a striped sailor's shirt, and his face is built from slabs of green, pink and blue, laid on in broad blunt strokes as if modelled in clay. There is no flattery and little fine detail, just a solid, direct man of 37 looking back at you. He painted only four self-portraits in his entire life, and this is the earliest of them. That streak of green running down the middle of his face is exactly the kind of thing that had earned his circle its name the year before.