Young Woman before an Aquarium (Jeune fille devant un aquarium)

Discussion

FROM THE BARNES FOUNDATION’S CATALOG

In a room adorned with a geometric wall hanging and figural sketches, a woman gazes into a bowl with three goldfish. Pine branches wreathe the bowl's base. For Matisse, goldfish were a metaphor for the relation between external reality and how we perceive it. He stated, "The object must act powerfully on the imagination; the artist's feeling expressing itself through the object must make the object worthy of interest: it says only what it is made to say."

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