Jardin du Luxembourg · the gates close at 18:15 in late October; listen from the railings on rue Guynemer, or later
Henri Matisse, Le Jardin du Luxembourg, c. 1901. Hermitage. Public domain.Albert Marquet, An Alley in the Jardin du Luxembourg, 1901. Hermitage. Public domain.
Spot the Matisse before you read the captions: two friends, the same alleys, the same year.
▶ Listen · The garden turned into Tahiti · 4 min
From about 1898 Matisse and Albert Marquet, friends since Gustave Moreau's studio, painted outdoors together in this garden, young and broke. Matisse's alley has a tall red tree, two pink trees and blue shadows; no palace, no basin, no statue. The Russian collector Shchukin bought it in 1906, and it hangs in Saint Petersburg, where the curator says it was painted under Gauguin's Polynesian influence and a scholar remarked that without the signature you would hardly take it for Paris. He turned the Luxembourg into Tahiti. A second Matisse view of the garden, from 1903, was stolen from a museum in Rio in 2006 and never found.
At the garden's north-west corner stood the State's museum of living artists. In 1922 the State bought a Matisse for it, an odalisque painted in Nice: seventeen years after the wild beasts, the first Matisse officially bought for a Paris museum.
Fun fact
Others painted here too: a German student of Matisse in 1910, a Japanese painter in 1927, and the Turkish painter Namık İsmail, whose 1924 picture of the fountain at the garden's far end hangs in Istanbul.
Quiz · Which city holds both friends' paintings of these alleys today?
Saint Petersburg, in the Hermitage.
The story in six panels
1About 1898. Matisse and Marquet, broke, carry easels into the Luxembourg garden.
2Same alley, same year, 1901. Two canvases.
3Marquet paints the trees quietly, in grey-green.
4Matisse paints a red tree, two pink trees, blue shadows. No palace, no statue. “That is not Paris.”
51906. The Russian collector Shchukin buys it. It hangs today in Saint Petersburg.
6A scholar: without the signature, you would hardly take it for Paris. “Tahiti?”
Drawn in paper-cut style with Gemini from our script; no real person is depicted.
More to look at
Namık İsmail, Carpeaux Fountain in Paris, 1924. Istanbul Painting and Sculpture Museum. Public domain.Henri Rousseau, The Luxembourg Gardens. Monument to Chopin, 1909. Hermitage. Public domain.
