Details
The image
A landscape reduced to overlapping fields of colour, hills drawn as curves and trees as flat shapes, the sky one tone from edge to edge. There is no detail and no perspective and the composition is held together by the relation between the areas rather than by drawing.
Where it comes from
The painting reproduced here was made by Henri Matisse in 1905 at Collioure, on the Mediterranean coast, in the summer that gave the Fauves their name. Colour was used as structure rather than as description: a hillside in one flat tone, a tree reduced to its outline, a sky that refuses to be a gradient. The approach was argued about fiercely at the time and is now the basis of how colour is taught in design schools, because it turns a picture into an arrangement of weights.
On the wall
It brings warmth and movement into a room, so it suits a living room, a bedroom or a hallway with pale walls. Because the areas are large and the palette limited, it holds a big wall without adding detail. In a group it should be the piece that introduces colour.
In company
The Matisse collection is where the same argument is made again and again.Avoid hanging it beside dense illustration, the flat areas need empty space to read as decisions.
