Dominique Fourcade wrote Rêver à trois aubergines for the special issue of the magazine Critique devoted to Henri Matisse, published in May 1974. This essay led to the rediscovery of a major painting kept at the Musée de Grenoble, Intérieur aux aubergines, one of the four great symphonic interiors painted by Matisse in 1911, the other three being L'Atelier rouge, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, L'Atelier rose at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, and Intérieur de famille, at the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg.

Of these four paintings, Intérieur aux aubergines is the most complex, the most ambitious, the most enigmatic and probably the most beautiful. The essay we are reprinting traces its surprising history, restores its context and analyses its composition. It also exposes its themes, arranged over the entire surface in a meeting and accumulation unprecedented in Matisse's work.