A built picture, not an improvised one

The first thing to get straight about Le bonheur de vivre is that, for all its loose, dreamy ease, it is one of the most carefully constructed pictures Matisse ever made. The casual look is engineered. He worked it up through many preparatory sketches of the individual figures, and then drew a cartoon of the whole thing, which in painting does not mean anything funny: a cartoon is a full-size preparatory drawing, the entire composition mapped out at the scale of the final canvas before a drop of color goes down. He was not splashing out a vision. He was assembling a machine, piece by piece, to look like a vision.

The single best window into how he got there is a little oil sketch, the Sketch for “Le Bonheur de vivre” (1905–06), now at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The final painting is more than four times its size, and the two look strikingly different. The sketch is still painted in loose dabs of broken color, the technique of Neo-Impressionism(the method, also called pointillism, of building an image out of small separate touches of pure color meant to mix in the viewer’s eye). The big final canvas has thrown all that out: flat, wide expanses of color and clean, linear figures. You can stand the two side by side and literally watch Matisse move, between study and painting, from dots to flat fields. (A second study is held by the Barnes itself.) That shift, from broken color to flat color, is the whole drama of the picture in miniature.

A picture this radical did not come from nowhere, and art historians have spent a century naming its ancestors. Here it pays to be careful, because some of those ancestors are documented and some are educated guesses. The one source that is genuinely nailed down, argued by the historian James Cuno in 1980 and Thomas Puttfarken soon after, is an old engraving: Agostino Carracci’s Love in the Golden Age (after the painter Paolo Fiammingo). It shares the very same setup, a pastoral golden-age idyll with naked figures at ease and, crucially, a ring of dancers in the background, the exact motif Matisse uses. That one is a real lineage, not a hunch.

The others are reasonable family resemblances rather than proven debts, so the honest words are “drew on” and “in the tradition of.” In its form and date the painting sits closest to Cézanne’s last great Bathers, nudes built into a landscape, a picture Matisse revered. The long sensual curve of the bodies belongs to the world of Ingres and his odalisques (the reclining harem nudes Ingres painted, all flowing contour). And behind all of it stands the whole old pastoral tradition, the dream of Arcadia, the mythic carefree countryside, painted for centuries by Titian, Poussin, and Watteau. Since the 1980s, though, scholars have warned that chasing sources can become a parlor game that distracts from what matters, which is what Matisse actually did with all of it. He took the oldest, most respectable subject in European art, the golden-age idyll, and painted it in colors that would have made Titian drop his brush.