#fauvism

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.

He liked painting Paris from a window looking down like this — a habit he supposedly kept up for years. He got lumped in with the 'Fauves' at the scandal-causing show of 1905, though you'd never call this one wild or loud.

They say he mixed the loose, bright color of the Fauves with the more broken-up shapes of the Cubists, and ran with a Moscow group trying to fuse that French style with older Russian folk prints.

According to Wikipedia, this was painted right alongside Matisse in the same fishing village - supposedly part of the summer that kicked off Fauvism.

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.

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.