Le Bonheur de vivre

A wall-sized Arcadia of nudes lounging, piping, and dancing in colors no real meadow ever wore, the canvas Leo Stein called the most important picture of its moment and the one Picasso is said to have answered with Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.

1. 1
   The ring of dancers that became a painting

   Center background, on the far meadow: a small circle of figures joining hands

   Far back in the meadow, a little round-dance turns, figures linked hand to hand. This is the seed of an entire other canvas. Matisse pulled the motif out, blew it up, and made it The Dance (1909–10), one of the most famous images he ever painted. It is also the element art historians tie most firmly to his documented source: Agostino Carracci’s engraving Love in the Golden Age, which has the same ring of dancers off in the back of a pastoral idyll.
2. 2
   The piper in the foreground

   Bottom center, a seated nude playing a double pipe

   A figure sits and plays a double pipe, the kind of double flute that signals Arcadia, the mythic countryside of shepherds and ease. It is the pastoral note that tells you the whole scene is a golden-age dream, not a real afternoon. Watch the scale: read the player as a child and it sits comfortably beside the couple to the right; read it as an adult and the figures just behind become giants. The mismatch is on purpose.
3. 3
   The reclining nudes

   Foreground, left and center, figures stretched out on the rose-and-orange ground

   The lounging nudes are pure leisure, and that is the point. The “joy of life” in the title is bodily ease, not a story with a moral. They are also, like nearly every figure here, women, painted by a man for the male connoisseurs who would buy the canvas, squarely inside the old European convention of the idealized female nude. Their bodies are drawn as long serpentine curves, what art historians call arabesques, a flowing snaking line, and each is fenced by a single dark contour. Matisse cared more about that line than about anatomy, which is why limbs lengthen and bend past anything a real body does.
4. 4
   Color that answers to nothing in nature

   Everywhere: the orange-and-pink earth, the violet and green tree trunks, the lemon-and-rose sky

   There is no real meadow this color. The ground runs hot pink and orange, tree trunks go violet, the sky shades from lemon to rose, all in big flat fields with no modeling. Color here serves feeling and the design of the surface, not the look of any actual place. This is the core Fauve move, the wild-beast freedom Matisse had been mocked for the year before, now carried out at wall scale.
5. 5
   The embracing couple

   Bottom right, a pair of nudes locked together

   Down in the lower-right corner two figures embrace, the frankly sensual note that, with all the lounging and the piping, makes the picture a hymn to pleasure. Their small size against the looming figures just behind them is one of the clearest places to catch Matisse sizing his figures for the composition rather than for distance. Nothing in this picture obeys perspective; everything obeys the design.
6. 6
   The trees that arch like a curtain

   Upper edges, left and right, two large trees whose foliage bends inward over the scene

   The big trees do not recede into depth. Their curved trunks and overhanging branches arc inward and frame the meadow like a stage curtain, pressing the whole scene flat against the surface. The same snaking line that shapes the bodies shapes the trees, so figure and landscape rhyme. The canvas reads as one woven, shallow pattern, a decorated surface, not a deep window you look through.