Le Bateau

Matisse made this in 1953, in the last stretch of his life when illness kept him in bed and he could no longer stand at a canvas. So he worked with scissors instead, cutting shapes from sheets his assistants had painted with gouache and pinning them into place, a sailboat and, below it, its rippled reflection on the water. The two halves echo each other closely, which set up one of the museum world's better embarrassments. When the Museum of Modern Art showed the picture in 1961, it hung upside down for 47 days before a sharp-eyed visitor pointed it out. Something like 116,000 people had already walked past it, among them the artist's own son.