Correspondence between Shchukin and Matisse on the panels “Dance” and “Music” for a staircase

The Russians bought so much Matisse that admirers and friends even asked him whether his pictures would soon be visible only in Moscow.

Shchukin commissioned Dance as a large panel for a staircase landing, together with a second large canvas, Music. A touching correspondence passed between patron and painter: on seeing the watercolour sketches, the patron gingerly begged Matisse to be more careful with the nude, which he could not hang for all the world to see, unless as little figures in a private chamber. There were, he explained, two girls growing up in the house; Russia was at bottom an Eastern country, and in the East such things are not shown to children, while Moscow society put him in mind of seventeenth-century Italy, where the nude was under a ban. Yet on seeing the more colourful sketch, Shchukin could no longer resist the pull of Dance and asked Matisse to paint everything as it was.

But the picture was to meet with an icy reception, and even the Paris public all but spat at it, so that Shchukin again renounced the canvas. A few days later, however, he was already writing to Matisse, confessing his love for Dance and Music.