Henri Matisse

This showed at a Paris salon alongside a handful of painters using color this wild — critics apparently called them 'the wild beasts,' and the nickname (Fauves) stuck.

A Russian businessman ordered this for the staircase of his Moscow house, along with a second panel to hang near it. Supposedly he got nervous about all the bare bodies, pulled out, then changed his mind and took them anyway.

It's one of a run of goldfish pictures he turned out over a few months. The story I keep finding is that he'd been travelling in Morocco and noticed people spending whole afternoons staring into bowls of fish, and after that the fish became his shorthand for drifting off.

The title comes from a line in a Baudelaire poem, apparently — luxury, calm, pleasure. He'd spent a summer down on the Mediterranean coast with a painter who worked entirely in separate little dots, and it looks like he tried the method on for size here before heading off somewhere else with it.

I read that Matisse painted this from inside a moving car — had his son pull over on a drive to an airport near Paris in 1917, then worked through the windshield with the windows shut while passing traffic rocked the car back and forth.

This is believed to be Matisse's own garden outside Paris, with what's said to be his daughter and a friend having tea — that flat, saturated color was already becoming his signature.

This is said to have been part of the infamous exhibition nicknamed the cage of wild beasts by a critic who couldn't believe the color — the name stuck to the whole group of painters.

When this first went up in public the crowd was genuinely angry about it — the colours, mostly, from what I've read. Hard to picture now, people furious at a painting of a picnic. The write-ups I found call it one of the starting points of modern painting.

He had rooms looking straight out at this view and painted it again and again across the years, from what I've read. This is one of the earlier goes, well before the colour got loud.

Made to order for a rich Russian collector's staircase, one of a pair — the other one has people dancing instead. Wikipedia reckons he worked with no sketches at all, straight onto the canvas, moving things around until it looked right.