La Desserte rouge (Harmonie en rouge)

The Russian textile magnate Sergei Shchukin commissioned this as a decorative panel for the dining room of his Moscow mansion, and what he first received was not red at all. Matisse worked the room up in green, then repainted it blue, and Shchukin had already taken delivery of a 'Harmony in Blue' when Matisse asked for it back and drowned the whole canvas in red. The wall and the tablecloth are now the same flat crimson, so the same curling blue arabesque of flowers and vines runs across both, and you lose the line where the table stops and the wall begins. Through the one window the garden stays cool and green. A maid leans in over a bowl of fruit, the ordinary reason the picture is called a dessert.