Harmony in Red is a dining room with the depth taken out. The tablecloth and the wall carry the same dark blue swirls on the same red ground, so the table seems to melt into the room. Matisse called the picture a decorative panel, and he made it for the dining room of the Russian collector Sergei Shchukin.
It was meant to hang in Shchukin's house in Moscow, in the room where he ate. A painting for a dinner table has to be lived with every day, and that shaped how Matisse built it.
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The red was not the plan. Shchukin ordered a picture called Harmony in Blue, and the first version was blue. Matisse was not satisfied with it, and he painted it over in red.
A collector who ordered a blue room did not expect to receive a red one. I don't read the change as a whim. Nobody covers a canvas more than two meters wide in a single color by accident.
Matisse never gave a tidy reason. He said he did not know where he got the color red. What he did leave was a painting in which the red does all the work, and a patron who, by every account, kept it.
What You'll Discover
What Shchukin said about the red.
How a table vanishes into a wall.
Where the room still has depth.
What Matisse wanted it to do.
Where the red room ended up.