Le Bonheur de vivre

When Matisse showed this at the Salon des Indépendants in the spring of 1906, it caused something close to public outrage. Viewers who came expecting a pleasant scene of figures in a landscape found nudes lounging and dancing in a meadow drenched in cadmium orange, pink and green, their bodies stretched and simplified, the space tipping and folding in ways that ignored ordinary perspective. Even sympathetic critics found it hard to defend. The picture pulls together the whole tradition of the Arcadian idyll, bodies at ease in nature, and pushes the color past anything description required. In the distance, a ring of small figures joins hands and dances, an idea Matisse would return to and paint on its own a few years later. The young collector Albert Barnes bought it and carried it off to Pennsylvania, where for decades almost no one was allowed to reproduce it in color.