Le Bonheur de Vivre (The Joy of Life)

The story of Le Bonheur de Vivre (The Joy of Life)

A grove where the trees are pink and the grass is orange, and nobody is wearing anything. Figures lie in the foreground, embrace under the trees, play a pipe, and, far back on the hill, hold hands in a ring. Matisse painted it over the winter of 1905 to 1906, right after the show that got his circle called wild beasts, and it belongs to the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, where for decades you could only see it in a stairwell. It is the painting that made Picasso nervous enough to go and paint something bigger.

On a wall, this is the most colorful thing in the room by a distance. The palette is tangerine, salmon pink, lavender, lemon, and a single band of blue-green, laid on in flat, sweet passages with almost no shadow. It brightens a bedroom, a sunroom, a kitchen, or a bright living room, and it suits bohemian, Mediterranean, mid-century, and color-first interiors. It is a wide image. We offer it up to the Medium at 22 × 16 in, the size that lets you find the dancers on the hill, and the Small at 16.5 × 12 in works well in a pair with another Matisse.

The ring of dancers in the background became The Dance five years later, and its partner Music came from the same commission. Derain's Mountains at Collioure is the landscape from the summer that unleashed these colors. More from Henri Matisse.

Printed in our studio from a public-domain photograph of the Barnes canvas, with the pastel passages kept soft rather than oversaturated.