MoMA Learning

In Landscape at Collioure, Matisse applied oil paint onto an unprimed raw canvas, using paint sometimes directly from the tube and often with quick, sketchy strokes. Despite the fact that some of the canvas was left untouched, showing raw material between the strokes of paint, this painting is considered a “finished” work.

Landscape at Collioure represents the moment at which Matisse began to use a more instinctive, spontaneous way of painting that was unparalleled among his contemporaries. The landscapes he painted in the summer of 1905 were “wilder, more reckless than any subsequently produced in his career,” according to Matisse scholar John Elderfield. “In the works of that period color speaks for itself with a directness previously unknown in Western painting, and speaks directly too of the emotional response to the natural world that required changing the color of this world the better to render that emotion.”¹