In the autumn of 1905, a small group of French painters hung a room of pictures at the Paris Salon d'Automne in colours nobody had used before. A critic called the room a cage of wild beasts. The name stuck. The movement was two years long, the colour decisions were permanent, and almost every painter who broke from the academy in the next twenty years walked through the door the Fauves opened.

Five canvases, fifty years. How Henri Matisse rebuilt painting around colour — from the wild-beasts of 1905 to the scissors he picked up in 1941.