The 'Noble Rags' of Henri Matisse

Today at London's Royal Academy, "Matisse, His Art and Textiles: The Fabric of Dreams," opens.

The exhibition explores some of the ways in which Matisse's fabric collection served him as an experimental laboratory.

As you enter you're confronted with a length of white fabric with a pattern of dark-blue arabesques and flower baskets.

This piece of toule de Jouy, which Matisse saw in a second-hand clothes shop from the top of a Parisian bus in 1903, for the next several decades inspired and became part of his most innovative and risk-taking paintings (above).

Matisse collected fabrics ranging from Parisian 19th-century chintz and woven silk to Javanese batik, Egyptian curtains, Persian and Algerian rugs, and Kuba cloths from Zaire, found in flea markets and junk shops and each finding a place in his "working library" of patterns and textures.

This show drapes swaths of his fabrics across several rooms, showing them in juxtaposition to the paintings they inspired.

The show closes on May 30, then moves across the pond to New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art where it will be up from June 23 to September 25.