橙子静物

Early in 1912 Matisse was in Tangier, on his first trip to Morocco, and it would not stop raining. Stuck indoors and miserable, he painted this basket of oranges sitting on a cloth strewn with flowers. He later said the picture was born of misery. The colour gives none of that away. The oranges glow against the patterned ground with exactly the warmth he had crossed the sea to find. The painting's second life is the surprising part. Pablo Picasso, Matisse's great rival for the title of the century's leading painter, bought it and kept it for the rest of his life. Picasso owned very few pictures by other living artists, and he prized this one, hanging it among his own work. It passed with his estate to the museum in Paris that now bears his name.