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 Matisse's desire to change the pastoral common landscape characterized since ancient times by strong contour lines and Fauvist colours. Matisse living through Impressionism saw the need and desire for art to be pushed beyond the boundaries of preconceived notions of what was aesthetically pleasing, which had barely changed since the art's founding. In The Joy of Living, Matisse paints a pastoral landscape, a quiet and peaceful countryside scene with a new twist. This piece had bright, cheerful colors and showed a change in the human form through the line. In this painting, Matisse shows pleasant outdoor activities, a scene that has been replicated for more than a hundred years. Here he challenges the common composition, used by art masters such as Giovanni Bellini and Titian. In this extraordinarily large piece he combines all previous pastoral landscapes from art history into one cohesive piece (Arnason). The piece has an overall sensual and erotic effect caused by the voluptuous figures and the almost pulsating background of the trees, created with bright Fauvist 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 folded behind her neck is a common pose thought to have been adopted by Cezanne, an impressionist painter who greatly inspired Matisse (Picasso and Matisse). The viewer's eye then travels around the painting to a couple embracing and then people dancing. The latter group became the inspiration for Matisse's The Dance paintings. Among the trees on the far right is a Shepard playing a flute in his... center of the paper... internal reality and given the new commitment to revealing the artist's experience of reality through the pure chromatic intensity of the colors . (Arnason) Matisse in this painting uses color to show the differences between nature and people unlike the paintings before him where the differences were shown through chiaroscuro and minute details. Although Fauvism was one of the shortest periods in all of art history, it is still possible to see echoes of its key colors for many periods after its end. For hundreds of years before The Joy of Living landscapes with nudes performing pleasurable activities were created they were painting; however, none were made in the style in which Matisse painted his figures. (Kramer) Matisse painted this scene with heavy contour lines as thick as his thumb. He reduces figures and landscape to their simplest form by eliminating chiaroscuro and fine details.