Canal du Midi belongs to a series of pictures painted by Henri Matisse near Toulouse during the winter of 1898-1899. Matisse, who left Moreau's studio in the autumn of 1897, married Amélie Parayre in January of the following year. After a brief honeymoon in London, the couple sojourned for six months in Ajaccio, Corsica.
Then, in August 1898, Matisse and his wife travelled to Toulouse, and stayed for six months with Amélie's parents.
This was the first time Matisse visited the South and he always remembered it as his first encounter with light and colour. Many of the landscapes he painted during that period, including the one we are commenting on, were probably executed outdoors, directly from the model. Yet the colour in them is not naturalistic.
