Café Árabe

Matisse made this in 1913, just after his second long stay in Morocco, and it is the calmest and barest of everything he brought back. Men sit or lie about a coffeehouse in a wide field of soft blue-green, their faces barely drawn, a couple of them watching a bowl of goldfish and a single flower. Almost nothing happens, and that was the point. The Russian collector Sergei Shchukin bought it that same year for his Moscow house, and wrote to Matisse that he now loved it more than the others and would sit looking at it for an hour at a time. After the Revolution Shchukin's collection was nationalised, which is how a Moroccan afternoon by Matisse came to hang in Saint Petersburg.