From 1905 to 1906, Henri Matisse completed Le Bonheur de vivre or The Joy of Living, one of the most famous works of Fauvism, which demonstrated the desire to Matisse changed the common pastoral landscape found since antiquity with strong contour lines and tawny colors. Matisse living through Impressionism saw the need and desire to push art beyond the boundaries of preconceived notions of what was aesthetic, which had remained virtually unchanged since the founding of art. In The Joy of Living, Matisse paints a pastoral landscape, a calm and peaceful scene of the countryside with a new twist. This piece had bright, cheerful colors and showed a change in human form across the line. In this painting, Matisse shows leisurely outdoor activities, a scene reproduced for over a hundred years. Here he questions the common composition, used by masters of the art such as Giovanni Bellini and Titian. In this impressively large work, he combines all previous pastoral landscapes in art history into one cohesive piece (Arnason). The piece has an overall sensual and erotic effect brought about by the voluptuous figures and the almost pulsating background of trees, done in bright tawny colors. The trees frame the painting and the small groups of people inside. The woman on the far left with her arms raised and hands crossed behind her neck is a common pose thought to have adopted from Cézanne, an impressionist painter who greatly inspired Matisse (Picasso and Matisse). The viewer's eye then travels across the painting. to a couple kissing and then to people dancing. The latter group became the inspiration for Matisse's La Danse paintings. In the trees on the far right is a Shepard playing the flute in the middle of his paper......eternal reality and given the new commitment to revealing the artist's experience of reality through colors pure chromatic intensity. (Arnason) Matisse in this painting uses color to show the differences between nature and people, unlike earlier paintings where the differences were shown with chiaroscuro and minute details. Although Fauvism was one of the shortest periods in all of art history, you can still see an echo of its vivid colors for many periods after it ended. For hundreds of years, before the creation of The Joy of Living, we were painting landscapes with nudes doing leisurely activities; however, none were made in the style in which Matisse painted his figures. (Kramer) Matisse painted this scene with thumb-thick contour lines. It reduces the figures and landscape to its simplest form by removing chiaroscuro and fine details..