Still Life with Rayfish

In 1923 the American collector Albert Barnes saw a Soutine portrait of a pastry cook at the Paris dealer Paul Guillaume's, asked to see the rest, and bought dozens of canvases in one sitting. Soutine had been living hand to mouth in Montparnasse for about a decade. Inside a year his prices had climbed and he was a name on both sides of the Atlantic.

One of the things he did next was go back to the Louvre. This ray comes out of a kitchen picture there by the French painter Chardin, made in the 1720s, in which a gutted fish hangs open above a table and a cat starts back from it. Soutine kept the split body and the spilling insides and got rid of the cat.

The Metropolitan Museum, which owns this version, describes the bloody entrails as paired with a smiling, almost human mouth.