Collioure, rue du Soleil

Matisse got off the train at Collioure on 16 May 1905. It was a Catalan fishing port near the Spanish border where anchovies and sardines paid for most of the town, and part of the reason he went was that it was cheap. He had a wife, three children and very few sales.

The rue du Soleil still runs through the old streets behind the harbour. In the canvases he made there that summer he stopped covering the surface, laying colour down in separate strokes and leaving the bare ground showing between them.

The painting hangs in Le Cateau-Cambrésis, the weaving town in the far north of France where he was born and where he set up a museum of his own work in 1952. The museum bought this canvas in 1996, with regional funding, more than 90 years after the summer that produced it.