Dishes and Fruit - Henri Matisse

Painting Detail

Dishes and Fruit
Artist: Henri Matisse
Medium: Painting, Oil on canvas, 51x61.5 cm
Date: 1901
Genre: Still Life
Source: State Museum of New Western Art, Moscow, 1934

In 1901, the year in which this work was painted, a retrospective exhibition was held in Paris of the work of van Gogh, who had died in 1890. The exhibition was to have an important influence on young artists and the colouring in this painting may owe some debt to a visit to the exhibition. Matisse's development in this direction, however, was already predetermined by his unique gift for colour.

The pure colour in the still life is intense and rich. The deep and complexe lilac-violet, the powerful ring of the orange jug, which seemes to have absorbed the heat of the sun; the yellow lemon in the cold shade and the bright red handle, the colour of the latter seeming to find confirmation not only in the ripe tomato but in the whole painterly construction of the canvas.