in 1906, Henri Matisse finished what is often considered his greatest Fauve painting, the Bonheur de Vivre, or the “Joy of Life." It is a large-scale painting depicting an Arcadian landscape filled with brilliantly colored forest, meadow, sea, and sky and populated by nude figures both at rest and in motion. As with the earlier Fauve canvases, color is responsive only to emotional expression and the formal needs of the canvas, not the realities of nature. The references are many, but in form and date, Bonheur de Vivre is closest to Cézanne’s last great image of bathers.