Madras vermelho

Two years earlier, in 1905, a critic had walked into a room of paintings by Matisse and his friends, seen the raw, unmixed colour, and called them wild beasts, fauves. The name stuck, and by 1907, when Matisse painted his wife Amelie in this red madras headscarf, he was pushing the idea further. Her face is built from flat patches of colour against a solid blue wall, the pattern of the scarf and dress treated as seriously as her features. He shows her staring straight out, green eyes fixed on the viewer. When it went on show at the Salon d'Automne that autumn, the critics were not kind. Amelie sat for many of his boldest experiments in these years.