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, made for the dining room of the Russian collector Sergei Shchukin, and he wanted it to calm whoever sat at that table.
The room was in Shchukin's house in Moscow. A painting that hangs in the room where he ate is seen every day, and that shaped how Matisse built it.
Cool Stories About Art is a newsletter to learn art the fun way.
Join 200,000+ readers and get:
10 new art stories / month
The entire archive of content (1,000+ articles)
Comment, ask questions, and chat with other readers
The red was not the plan. Shchukin, a Moscow textile merchant who bought Matisse's work, 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.
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.
Shchukin and the red room
Shchukin was the one who had to live with the new color, and his answer to the painter was "I like the red room enormously."
The accounts disagree on when Matisse changed the color. Some place it before the picture left Paris, others after Shchukin had already bought it. All of them agree that the blue came first, and that the red was Matisse's second decision.
Shchukin was not put off. In March 1909 he commissioned two more large panels from Matisse, Dance and Music, for the landing of the staircase in his home. He had accepted a red room in which the table has no visible edge, and Matisse had still left four small places where the room keeps its depth.
What You'll Discover
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.