● On view now — Collection Gallery, Room 17, North Wall
Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia · verified July 2026
FROM THE BARNES FOUNDATION’S CATALOG
This small work is an homage to another painting in the Barnes collection: Henri Matisse's The Joy of Life (1905–6). The artist, Florence Shubert, was a student at the Barnes Foundation in the mid-1940s; she would have had ample opportunity to study Matisse's monumental canvas, which Albert Barnes purchased in 1923. Although nonrepresentational, Shubert's piece references some of the colors of Matisse's painting, including yellow and blue, as well as the bright red mark at the center of the canvas. This painting is one of only a few purely abstract works Dr. Barnes collected.
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