Notre-Dame, später Nachmittag

For most of us Matisse means color turned all the way up, but this dim view of Notre-Dame comes from a stretch when his life had gone gray. In 1902 his wife's parents were caught up in the Humbert affair, one of the great financial swindles of the age, and Matisse spent months tangled in lawyers and unsold work with little money coming in. Paintings from these two years are so muted that historians call it his dark period. He painted the cathedral again and again from the window of his apartment on the Quai Saint-Michel, looking across the Seine. Here it is dusk, the stone dissolving into blue-grays, the open shutter and a bare wall pulled into the same flat weave as the river and the sky.