Le Bonheur de Vivre (The Joy of Life)

Henri Matisse

Oil on canvas

Barnes Foundation

Le Bonheur de Vivre, or The Joy of Life, is a monumental oil on canvas painting by Henri Matisse, completed between 1905 and 1906 and first exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris in 1906. The large-scale work depicts an Arcadian landscape of forest, meadow, sea, and sky populated by nude figures reclining, embracing, making music, and dancing in a vivid, non-naturalistic palette characteristic of Fauvism. Matisse abandoned conventional perspective and realistic color in favor of bold, flat expanses of cadmium-rich hue and sinuous arabesques, asserting that color should serve emotional expression rather than descriptive accuracy. Widely regarded alongside Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon as one of the foundational works of early modernism, the painting is considered by scholars to represent the climactic achievement of the Fauvist movement.