This brightly colored, vividly patterned canvas records Haywood Bill Rivers’ early interest in Henri Matisse. During his student years at Baltimore’s Douglass High School, Rivers discovered works by Matisse in the Cone Collection at the BMA. A decade later, Rivers spent two years at the Art Students League in New York, where he encountered the figurative modernism of Jacob Lawrence and Horace Pippin. After leaving the Art Students League, Rivers showed his work at the BMA, where Tailor Shop was awarded the 1948 Maryland Artists Exhibition Purchase Prize. Supported by the Julius Rosenwald Foundation, a Chicago-based charity that took special interest in African-American art and artists, Rivers then left for France, where met his early hero Matisse, studied at the École Musée du Louvre, and managed Galerie Huit, an exhibition space for Americans in Paris. The frame on this picture is original.