Still Life with The Dance

Here we see part of the artist's studio on the Boulevard des Invalides. In his experiments with space and colour, the artist often took a corner of one his studios as the point of departure, increasingly so in the 1910s. Turning the table such that its corner moves sharply into the depths of the painting, Matisse shows the viewer his studio, fixing attention on the large panel, "The Dance", standing on the easel. Clearly he was working both on this first version of "The Dance" (now in the Museum of Modern Art, New York) and the Hermitage still life at the same time.