#figures

Whatever this looked like when it went up, decades of weather have worn it down to a faint charcoal sketch of itself.

Wikipedia doesn't say much beyond names — apparently this is a real family, painted by a Czech-born LA artist who mixed hard cubist edges with a hazy hill-town backdrop.

They say this is 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.

From what I've read, he did a lot of paintings in black and white on purpose — they were headed for magazine pages, which could only print grey anyway.