Dishes and Fruit

Henri Matisse's 'Dishes and Fruit' (1901) is an early still life from the years when he was still absorbing and moving beyond the influence of Cézanne — his engagement with the still-life tradition was fundamental to his development, and his repeated investigation of tabletop arrangements of fruit and ceramic objects followed the Cézannean logic of treating the still life as a laboratory for pictorial investigation. By 1901 Matisse was moving beyond his academic training while the full development of his mature Fauvist style was still several years away.

Matisse renders the dishes and fruit with the constructive approach he was developing under Cézanne's influence — the objects organized within the pictorial space with deliberate formal attention, the relationships between the ceramic surfaces and the fruit's organic forms investigated through color and spatial organization. His handling at this transitional moment shows the tension between his academic training and the bolder formal approach he was developing. The still life's color relationships already show his characteristic chromatic sensibility beginning to assert itself.