Chapel of Saint Joseph, Saint-Tropez

Matisse's 'Chapel of Saint Joseph, Saint-Tropez' (1904) was painted during the summer he spent at Saint-Tropez as a guest of Paul Signac, the Pointillist painter who had settled there and was actively promoting Neo-Impressionist colour theory. The summer with Signac was a crucial turning point: Matisse absorbed the Divisionist technique and used it to explore intense Mediterranean light with a freedom that pointed beyond Pointillism toward Fauvism. The following year's Salon d'Automne would launch Fauvism as a movement, and this chapel painting documents the immediate precursor moment. The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds this canvas as a key transitional work.

Matisse applies paint in small, distinct strokes of unmixed colour in the Neo-Impressionist manner he was learning from Signac, but his palette is already more intense and less systematic than orthodox Divisionism. Warm ochres and pinks of the chapel walls are set against cool greens and blues of vegetation and sky. The colour relationships have an audacity that goes beyond scientific colour theory toward pure chromatic expression.