Woman in Green

Painted in 1909 and held in the Hermitage, 'Woman in Green' belongs to a series of boldly coloured figure paintings Matisse produced in the years between Fauvism and his first Moroccan journey, when he was working through the implications of his 1905–07 colour discoveries in more sustained compositional contexts. Green as a dominant colour for a figure painting was itself a radical choice — the tradition of figure painting organised its colour around flesh tones, and to flood a human subject with an alien colour required a different pictorial logic, one in which colour expresses something beyond description. The work was acquired by Shchukin and thus entered the Hermitage along with dozens of other examples from these crucial years. The post-Fauvist years between 1906 and 1912 represent some of the most intensive and various experimentation in Matisse's career, as he worked through the implications of the 1905 colour revolution across a wide range of subjects and scales.

A dominant green pervades the composition, applied in broad, confident strokes that describe both the figure's clothing and the surrounding space. Matisse uses warm and cool variants of the hue to suggest volume without conventional shadow.