When Henri Matisse’s “Femme au chapeau” (Woman with a Hat) was first shown at the 1905 Paris Salon d’Automne, it inspired whispered insults and bursts of laughter. A portrait of Matisse’s devoted wife Amélie, a milliner who wears a hat of her own creation, it violated the era’s ideas about the acceptable use of color and the staid conventions of portraiture. In truth, it was only nominally a portrait, as Matisse used his wife, who posed in a black dress, as a kind of screen on which he projected his experiments with color.