Les Poissons rouges

Earlier in 1912 Matisse had been in Tangier, and he noticed how people there would sit for a long time gazing at goldfish in a bowl. That stillness is what he brought back. He painted this in his garden studio outside Paris, four orange fish stacked in a glass cylinder among leaves, the water bending their shapes. Sergei Shchukin, a Moscow textile merchant who was buying Matisse faster than anyone, took it almost at once for his mansion. It hung in his pink drawing room until the Revolution swept his collection into state hands. The fish sit at the exact center, the calmest thing in a picture that otherwise tips and leans around them.