The Red Studio

Matisse painted The Red Studio in the fall of 1911 at his studio in Issy-les-Moulineaux, outside Paris. He was 41 and had just returned from seeing Islamic art in Munich and the great Matisse retrospective organized by Russian collectors Sergey Shchukin and Ivan Morozov. The painting shows Matisse's studio from an elevated viewpoint. The entire room is flooded in a single shade of venetian red, with no variation across walls, floor, or furniture. A grandfather clock stands at the center. Chairs, a table, a dresser, and a bed are outlined in thin yellow lines, as if floating in the red. Matisse's own paintings hang on the walls, rendered in their original colors against the red. A glass vase with flowers sits on a stool. The canvas is large, roughly 71 by 86 inches, landscape format. Matisse had been working toward this kind of radical simplification since 1907. The Red Studio goes further than anything he had done before. He eliminated all spatial cues: there are no shadows, no gradients, no perspective lines. The only depth comes from the paintings on the walls and the objects outlined in yellow. The red is not a background; it is the painting. French painting in 1911 was in a period of experimentation. Picasso and Braque were developing Cubism in Paris. Matisse was working in his own direction, pushing color toward abstraction without abandoning representation. The Red Studio was commissioned by the Russian collector Sergey Shchukin, who hung it in his Moscow mansion alongside other Matisses. It is now at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Oil on canvas, 181 by 219 centimeters. Matisse painted the red in thin, even layers, allowing the texture of the canvas to show through. The furniture is drawn in quick lines of yellow paint, with no filling. The paintings on the walls are small, carefully rendered reproductions of his own works. This painting works in a living room, studio, or office. The intense red dominates the space, so it needs a room with white or neutral walls. The 18x24 framed version in a white frame balances the red. The 16x20 works in a smaller space. The painting is in the Museum of Modern Art, New York. This is a public domain artwork, sourced from Wikimedia Commons. We print it on archival matte paper at sizes from 8x10 to 24x36 inches, framed or unframed. The image is printed at full resolution with no cropping.