The Artist's Garden at Issy les Moulineaux 1918

Henri Matisse made this oil on canvas painting, The Artist's Garden at Issy les Moulineaux, with what seems like playful dabs of colour, but it’s more rigorous than that! It’s not about the ‘right’ colours, more about the relationships between colours. Up close you can see how Matisse loaded his brush with plenty of paint. The painting is about touch, the way the bristles move and leave ridges of paint. Look at the way he builds up the layers of green in the hedges. The marks are so physical, you could almost reach out and rearrange them. The brown squiggles at the bottom suggest the edge of a pond and look almost abstract on their own, but as part of the whole, you know exactly what they are. Matisse made a lot of garden paintings and you could compare it to Monet, but for me, this is more like Cezanne. The way he breaks down the world into blocks of colour. It’s not about what you see, but how you see it.