Натюрморт с синей скатертью

The patterned cloth pouring down the canvas was a real thing Matisse owned, a length of blue-and-white toile de Jouy, cheap printed French cotton with a curling floral design that he kept in his studio and draped into painting after painting. By 1909 the man buying pictures like this was Sergei Shchukin, a Moscow textile merchant who covered his palace walls with the boldest new Matisses. Here the fabric's arabesques take over, flattening the table until the chocolate pot and the bottle seem to float on pure pattern, the turquoise ground and the darker blue of the print carrying the whole surface. Shchukin's collection was nationalised after the 1917 revolution, which is how a length of French printed cotton came to hang in the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg.