The Eel, Etretat

In the late summer of 1920 Matisse kept coming back to Étretat, a fishing town on the Normandy coast whose white chalk cliffs Monet and Courbet had made famous a generation before. Matisse mostly turned away from the postcard cliff. What he carried up from the shore instead was the catch: here a single conger eel, laid out on the grey pebbles under a flat northern sky. The war had ended less than two years earlier, and he was painting fish markets and beaches rather than grand subjects. When this canvas travelled to New York in 1921 and hung among Impressionist works at the Metropolitan, reviewers grumbled that he had roughed up a familiar seaside scene. The eel itself is the one dark, muscular curve cutting across all that grey shingle.