Still Life 1902

Henri Matisse made this painting, "Still Life", with oil on canvas, and it’s currently in the Musée Picasso, Paris. You can see how the objects are built up with lots of small strokes, kind of scumbled on, which gives everything a kind of hazy, dreamy effect. I’m interested in the earthy palette. It’s like he’s mixed everything from a big bucket of mud, but somehow, he’s made it sing. The paint handling has this beautiful quality where the brushwork is visible but not too fussy. Look at the way he's rendered the bowls and fruit at the front; these marks seem to dissolve into one another. You can sense him moving things around, trying to find the right balance. It reminds me of Cezanne, who was obsessed with structure, but here, it’s looser, more intuitive. It feels like he’s feeling his way through the painting, trusting his gut. Matisse continued to explore colour and form throughout his career, but here, in this earlier work, we see him laying the groundwork for his later experiments. It's a reminder that art is always evolving, always in conversation with what came before.