in red shows to what extent he had moved away from the other members of the Fauve group. For while distinct differences among those members were slowly separating them from each other, a good memasure of under standing still remained, not least a common consent that for the moment colour, in the particular way they had used it, had had its day. In spring 1908 Harmony in Red had been predominantly blue and before that, green: in the autumn Matisse painted it red. Colour remained the determining factor. The painting has another significance. It is a version on a grander scale of his first major exhibition piece, The Dinner-Table, which more than ten years before had set him on th path to colour. Ina very real sense, then, it can be seen as a celebration of the decade it had taken Matisse to reach the point from where he could confidently forward. Noless acutely than Matisse, Braque saw that Fauvism by its very nature, could last only a short time: "One cannot remain in a permanent state of crisis', he was to say later. Yer he recognized the necessity of having experienced that crisis. His move away from Fauvism was also are jection of its fierce individuality of a coherent school of painting. the year 1908 marks the beginning of his search for the anonymous personality, the effacement of individuality 'in order to find originality' which was to be so signnificant in the development of Cubism as well as in the larger context of twentieth-century art. As the youngest of the group he was the least ' encumbered by all the techniques of the past and the present', as Matisse put it. The same instinctive understanding of the physical nature of painting which had enabled him to dive in to Fauvism without any preliminaries enabled him to abandon the high pitch of Fauve colour (which in any case he had never fully embraced) while remembering the lessons of Fauvism.