Goldfish
Henri Matisse (1869 to 1954) · 1912
Four orange fish drift in a glass cylinder of water on a round table, and everything around them is green: leaves, ferns, a pink flowering plant and the pale green of the table top. The fish are painted twice, once seen through the side of the bowl and once from above, distorted by the surface of the water. The colours are so pure and flat that the picture looks almost like a poster, yet it is nearly a metre and a half tall and the orange seems to hum against the green.
Matisse painted it in the spring of 1912 in his conservatory at Issy les Moulineaux outside Paris, shortly after returning from Morocco, where he had watched people sit for hours contemplating goldfish in bowls. He said he wanted his art to be like a good armchair in which a tired businessman could rest. Look at how little is actually described: the table is a tilted ellipse, the chair back is a few purple lines, and the space does not obey perspective. Everything is organised around the contrast of orange and green, the two colours that most excite each other when placed side by side.
Sergei Shchukin bought the painting almost immediately and hung it in his Moscow mansion, where he already owned thirty seven Matisses, including the great Dance and Music that are now in the Hermitage. Matisse himself visited Moscow in 1911 to hang his pictures there, and was celebrated by the city's artists. After nationalisation in 1918 the picture went through the Museum of New Western Art and came to the Pushkin in 1948. It is the painting most often reproduced from the whole collection, and the one children point at first.
Did You Know? Matisse kept goldfish in his studio and painted them at least nine times between 1911 and 1914.
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