The Joy of Life

In 1906, Henri Matisse finished what is often considered his greatest Fauve painting, "Bonheur de vivre," or “The Joy of Life." It is a large-scale painting that depicts an Arcadian landscape filled with brilliantly-colored forest, meadow, sea, and sky and populated by nude figures both at rest and in motion. As with the earlier Fauve canvases, color is responsive only to emotional expression and the formal needs of the canvas, not the realities of nature. it is influenced by ideas drawn from Watteau, Poussin, Japanese woodcuts, Persian miniatures, and 19th-century Orientalist images of harems. The scene is made up of independent motifs arranged to form a complete composition. The massive painting and its shocking colors received mixed reviews at the Salon des Indépendants. Critics noted its new style — broad fields of color and linear figures, a clear rejection of Paul Signac's celebrated Pointillism.