담쟁이덩굴이 있는 정물

Matisse painted this in 1916, in the middle of the First World War. Too old to be called up, he stayed near Paris and kept working, and much of what he made in these years is quiet and closed-in, turned away from the news. On the table he set fruit, a vase of climbing ivy, and a small bronze nude he had modelled himself back in 1907 and liked to slip into his paintings for years afterward. The colours are soft and the shapes flow into one another in the flat, decorative harmony he spent his life refining. The picture belongs to the national modern-art collection in Paris and has hung on long-term loan in Besancon, in eastern France, since the early 1970s.