The Dessert: Harmony in Red

This painting went through three distinct color schemes before reaching its final state. Matisse began it with a green background, repainted it in blue before exhibiting it at the Salon d'Automne in Paris in 1908, and then — at the request of his patron or on his own initiative — repainted it in red in 1909, giving it the title it now bears. The Russian merchant Sergei Shchukin, who became Matisse's most important collector and patron, purchased the work at the 1908 exhibition for the dining room of his Trubetskoy Palace in Moscow. Shchukin ultimately assembled more than 37 Matisses and 51 Picassos — the most significant private collection of French modernism in the world — before the Russian Revolution of 1917 led to the nationalization of his collection. The paintings were held in the State Museum of Modern Western Art in Moscow until that institution was dissolved in 1948, when the collection was divided between the Hermitage in Leningrad and the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. This painting went to the Hermitage, where it has remained. The work reworks compositional elements from Matisse's 1897 painting La Desserte, itself in an Impressionist mode; the gap between the two versions measures the distance Matisse had traveled toward Fauvism in the intervening decade.