Donna con cappello

In the autumn of 1905 this portrait hung in a room at the Salon d'Automne in Paris that a critic walked into and called a cage of wild beasts, fauves, and the name stuck to a whole movement. The woman is Matisse's wife, Amelie, in a hat and gloves, but her face is built from streaks of green and violet and her clothes from clashing colour that answers to no real light. Visitors were genuinely offended. Matisse was even advised to pull it from the show. What saved his nerve was a sale: the American collectors Leo and Gertrude Stein bought it for 500 francs straight off the wall, and Leo, who thought it the nastiest smear of paint he had ever seen, bought it anyway. It now belongs to the museum of modern art in San Francisco.