The Silence that Lives in Houses 1947

Henri Matisse made this painting of a quiet scene in a house using oil on canvas. Look at those marks, so sure and casual. It’s interesting, isn’t it, how someone else’s way of seeing can shift our own? Matisse’s surface is pretty flat and opaque. There’s a lovely tension between the dark blacks and blues of the interior and the window, which lets in a view of the outside world rendered in brighter greens and yellows. See how those vertical white lines on the right side of the piece act as a kind of barrier, maybe a curtain or the edge of a wall, heightening the sense of being inside, apart from the world, in a quiet domestic space. It makes me think of Vuillard, another painter who liked to paint the quiet of interiors, but Matisse has a boldness to him. For Matisse, the act of painting was a process of seeking out new ways of seeing and feeling. He embraced the ambiguity of art, where fixed meanings give way to multiple interpretations.