Intérieur, bocal de poissons rouges

Matisse painted this in the autumn of 1914, at his Paris studio on the quai Saint-Michel, in the first weeks of a war that had just emptied the city of many of the men he knew. Through the window is the Seine and a bridge, rendered in flat blocks and a heavy blue-grey that keeps seeping in from outside. On the table sits one of his recurring bowls of goldfish, small warm sparks of orange held inside all that cool architecture. He came back to goldfish again and again in these years, drawn to their stillness, and here that calm feels deliberately guarded against whatever lay beyond the glass. He was 44, too old to be called up, and stayed in France painting through the whole of the war.