La musica

In 1909 a Moscow textile magnate, Sergei Shchukin, asked Matisse for two big panels for the staircase of his mansion, and this was the second of them, the companion to Dance. Matisse worked without preparatory sketches, painting straight onto the canvas, so the surface still carries the ghosts of his changes underneath. Five figures sit on a bare green slope against a flat blue sky, two of them making music while three simply listen, every body reduced to the same hot red. When the pair went on show in Paris in 1910 the reception was cold, and Shchukin at first got cold feet before deciding to keep them. The painting reached Moscow that December, and the raw red bodies on green and blue are still exactly the three colours Matisse allowed himself.