Matisse’s work as a fauvist painter was one phase in a lifelong engagement with color. This small but explosive work is celebrated as one of the most important early paintings of the fauve school, a style distinguished by a startling palette of saturated, unmixed colors and broad brushstrokes. This work was painted in Collioure, a small town on the Mediterranean coast of France, to which Matisse traveled in the summer of 1905 with André Derain, a fellow fauvist painter.