In 1905 Matisse rented a room to work above the Café Olo, overlooking the Port d’ Avall. The hubbub of the port, the ancestral dance of the Catalonians, is said to have inspired Dance which took the Paris art world by storm in 1910. "When Matisse was working on the Dance… he found himself crouching, ready to leap as he had done a few years before, one night on the beach at Collioure, in a round of Catalan fishermen far more violent in movement and appearance than the sardane.*"
*Aboriginal dance
Source: Hilary Spurling, The unknown Matisse : a life of Henri Matisse, the early years, 1869-1908
Still Life with 'Dance', oil on canvas, 1909
© 2012 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.