Femme devant un aquarium

After the First World War the painter who had once shocked Paris as the wildest of the Fauves settled into a quiet hotel room in Nice on the Mediterranean. Through the early 1920s Matisse painted the same warm interiors again and again, often with the same model, a young woman named Henriette Darricarrere. Here she leans on a table, chin on her hands, staring into a small glass tank of fish. Nothing happens. The whole picture is about attention, hers on the fish and ours on the patterned cloth, the light, the stillness of an afternoon indoors. Matisse worked at it across two years, and a Chicago couple bought it from his Paris dealer in 1923, the same year it first hung in the Art Institute.