Урок музыки

Matisse painted this in the summer of 1916, in his house at Issy-les-Moulineaux outside Paris, in the third year of the First World War. His son Pierre sits at the piano, though the figure looks younger than a boy of 16, flattened almost into a sign for a child at practice. The whole room has been pared back to broad planes of grey and green, a discipline that shows how closely Matisse had been watching the Cubists, even as he kept his own colour. A wedge of green is the garden through the window. At upper right hangs one of his own earlier paintings, a woman on a high stool, keeping watch over the lesson. A lit candle and a metronome stand on the piano, marking the time.