Still Life with The Dance

Painted in 1909 and housed in the Hermitage, 'Still Life with The Dance' is a remarkable self-referential work in which Matisse's monumental canvas Dance — then in progress for Shchukin — appears reflected or displayed in the background of a still-life composition. This kind of quotation of one's own work within another painting was unusual for the period and signals the degree to which large decorative projects dominated his thinking in 1909–10. The still life in the foreground, with its vases, fruit, and table, is rendered with the same flattening and colour intensity he was bringing to the large figurative canvases. Shchukin acquired this work alongside the finished Dance and Music panels, so the Hermitage holds both the reference and the referenced work. The painting raises interesting questions about the relationship between the intimate domestic scale of still life and the monumental ambitions of the mural-scale decorations.

The background panel showing the Dance creates an unusual spatial compression, the dancing figures appearing simultaneously as a painting-within-a-painting and as a wall decoration. Matisse unifies both zones through a shared palette dominated by reds, blues, and greens.