Guitar and Clarinet

Gris painted this in 1920, and it was a hard year for him. The war was over, but that winter he came down with pleurisy, a painful inflammation of the lining of the lungs, and went south to Bandol on the Mediterranean coast to recover. It was the first serious break in a health that would fail him for good a few years on. None of that strain shows in the picture. A guitar and a clarinet lie on a table, both instruments flattened into calm, interlocking planes, their curves and the line of keys along the clarinet still clearly there. Instruments were a favourite subject of his, silent shapes that fold neatly into a still life. He kept working through the illness, and the order in these fitted planes is as steady as anything from his healthier years, the clarinet's keys counted out in a neat row along its body.