Still Life with Oysters

Matisse set down this plate of oysters in 1940, one of the hardest years he would live through. That spring the German army broke into France, and by June the country had fallen. He had booked passage to Rio de Janeiro and had his papers in order to leave, then cancelled and stayed, writing that if everyone of any worth fled, there would be nothing of France left. None of that reaches the table. There are oysters on a white plate, a lemon, a knife with a yellow handle, a pink jug behind, all in warm and unhurried colour, as if the world beyond the window were perfectly calm. He kept painting quiet domestic things like this right through the war, in rented rooms along the Riviera.