The Conversation, a painting by Henri Matisse dating from 1908–1912, depicts the artist and his wife facing each other before a background of intense blue. It is in the collection of the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, Russia. This was among several works acquired directly from Matisse in Paris by the Russian collector Sergei Shchukin. After the Russian Revolution, the Shchukin collection was confiscated and, by 1948, was donated to the public along with the Ivan Morozov collection, at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow and the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg.