Woman with a Hat

Woman with a Hat (French: La femme au chapeau) is an oil-on-canvas painting by Henri Matisse. It depicts Matisse's wife, Amélie Matisse. It was painted in 1905 and exhibited at the Salon d'Automne during the autumn of the same year, along with works by André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck and several other artists later known as "Fauves".

Critic Louis Vauxcelles, in comparing the paintings of Matisse and his associates with a Renaissance-type sculpture displayed alongside them, used the phrase "Donatello chez les fauves..." (Donatello among the wild beasts). Woman with a Hat was at the center of this controversy, marking a stylistic shift in the work of Matisse from the Divisionist brushstrokes of his earlier work to a more expressive style. Its loose brushwork and "unfinished" quality shocked viewers as much as its vivid, non-naturalistic colors.