Image source: wikiart.org
First Impressions: A Table That Tilts Toward the Viewer
“Dishes and Melon” arrests the eye with a slanted tabletop bursting into the foreground like a stage, its actors an eccentric troupe of ceramics, cut fruit, and a dark jug casting a striking silhouette. The right side is commanded by a weighty green watermelon whose stripes echo the ridges and swerves of Matisse’s brush. At center and left, pale bowls, a pitcher, and a compact vase cluster beneath a pale figurine, while the wall behind shifts from ember red to a scratched field of yellow, as if lit by late afternoon sun. The composition feels immediate and physical; you can almost sense the painter stepping back and forth, measuring with his brush, then laying down pigment in confident slabs.
1907 In Context: From Fauvist Fire Toward Structural Discipline
By 1907, the blaze of high Fauvism had cooled into a more architectonic language. Matisse retained chromatic audacity, yet he was newly preoccupied with structure, balance, and economy. The painter’s immersion in sculpture during these years sharpened his feeling for mass and contour, and his interiors began to hold themselves together with a quiet, almost classical poise. “Dishes and Melon” belongs precisely to this hinge: color remains the primary agent of expression, but it is now embedded in sturdy drawing and a considered plan. The result is modern without bravado, decorative yet controlled, intensely alive yet serenely composed.
Composition: The Wedge, The Wall, and The Weight
The plan of the painting is deceptively simple. A white tabletop enters the picture like a wedge from the lower right, its near edge darkened to read as thickness. Matisse pushes that wedge up against a vertical wall whose left edge is punctuated by a pale window strip; the right side of the wall becomes a warm color field, red modulating to ochre in quick diagonal strokes. These big, simple shapes do most of the structural work, allowing the still life objects to behave with lively freedom without ever loosening the whole. The melon’s mass clinches the right-hand corner, counterbalanced by the dense silhouette of the black jug at left. Between them, a chain of circular forms—the bowl, the pitcher’s mouth, the smaller cup, the patterned plate—creates a visual bridge. The figurine near the back edge pops up as a slender vertical accent, a standing note in a score of rounded tones.
Space and Viewpoint: A Shallow Stage, Not a Measured Room
There is no illusionistic depth in the academic sense. Perspective is implied rather than calculated; the table tilts steeply toward us, the rear wall comes forward, and the shallow space compresses objects into contact. This compression serves two ends. It intensifies the relationships among shapes, and it brings the painting’s surface forward so that color can operate as structure rather than as skin. The viewpoint is slightly elevated—a vantage that reveals the platters’ ellipses and lets the watermelon’s stripes become concentric arcs, reinforcing the dynamism of the tabletop wedge.
Color Architecture: Complementary Drama with Measured Saturation
Red and green are the dominant protagonists. The wall at right glows with a lacquering of reds broken by ochre hatching; the table is cool, with mint and blue-green pulled thinly across the ground; the melon’s green body radiates against the warm wall with the inevitability of complementary contrast. But this is not a naive color wheel demonstration. Matisse inserts mediating tones—gray-violets on the window jamb, blue shadows tucked beneath rims, dusty pinks that soften the leaps between red and green. The white plate carries a floral blue so that the object reads both as form and as patch of cool light. Everywhere, color is doing double duty, describing object and governing composition simultaneously.
The Role of Black: A Live Contour, Not an Outline
The black jug is more than a prop; it is a calibrated device. Its silhouette stakes the left edge, pushes the eye back into the scene, and sets the tonality for the darkest accents throughout. Notice how the jug’s black returns as a trembling contour around the melon, the bowl’s lip, the small vase, and the plate. These blacks are never dead lines. They breathe, thicken, and fade, behaving like suppressed shadows or edges felt with the fingers. The spread of black gives the high-chroma passages resonance, the way a basso continuo steadies a melody.
Brushwork and Surface: Dragged Paint, Scumbles, and Quick Knives
Matisse’s handling is exuberantly varied. In the red wall, strokes cross each other like hatching, leaving scintillating glimpses of undercolor that read as reflected light. In the table, broad, semi-opaque sweeps are dragged just enough to expose the weave of canvas, a physical reminder that this world is painted rather than copied. On objects, he alternates calligraphic contours with flatter fills. The melon’s stripes are laid in wet over wet; the glistening spot at its top is a clipped, creamy accent; the plate’s pattern is dashed briskly, just enough to feel ceramic rather than textile. These changes in touch cue our senses—glazed jug, soft fruit, chalky faience—without minute detailing.
Objects as Characters: How Each Form Speaks
The watermelon is the anchor, a green planet with gravitational pull. Its stripes are not merely descriptive; they are directional vectors that radiate movement across the table. The cream dish in front of it, with pale yellow fruit, functions like a satellite, smaller in size but heightened by its bright note. The patterned plate to the right is a stage of its own, its curving rim echoing the melon while its blue design points us back toward the cool window strip. The dark jug at left supplies the necessary drama; its mass reads as weight and mystery, its matte surface absorbing the room’s light so that everything else appears brighter by contrast. The small figurine is a sly, vertical pause—part Greco-Roman souvenir, part reminder that sculpture underwrites the solid feel of all these painted things.
Light and Illumination: Built from Temperatures, Not Cast Shadows
Matisse avoids descriptive shadows. Instead he builds light through temperature contrasts and value shifts. The window strip at left floods the scene with a cool breath that touches the table’s surface and lightly chills the rims of bowls. The red wall, basking in warmth, bounces back into objects, tinting their highlights a faint peach. When warm and cool overlap, a sensation of air emerges. You feel illumination more than you can trace it, and because light is made from color relations rather than literal lamps and shadows, it feels mobile and alive.
Drawing Through Paint: The Sculptor’s Intelligence
Edges are invented, not merely found. The thickened contour around the melon and the jug behaves like a sculptor’s tool, turning form in space with pressure. The back rim of the table is broken and resumed, letting the wall color nibble into the plane. The bowl’s ellipse is not a perfect oval; it is a felt shape, slightly asymmetrical so it looks seen rather than measured. This elastic drawing gives the still life a living presence and avoids the sterility of diagrammatic perspective.
The Table as Theatre: Why the Wedge Matters
By thrusting the tabletop like a wedge into the picture, Matisse dissolves the distance between viewer and object. The picture becomes an encounter rather than a report. The wedge also supplies forward momentum that the red wall checks and turns. This exchange—advance and resistance—sets the painting’s rhythm. The viewer’s eye rushes along the table’s diagonal, strikes the glowing wall, then bounces left toward the shadowy jug and up to the figurine. The painting thus conducts the eye in loops, never dumping it out of the frame.
Ornament and Restraint: Patterns that Serve Structure
The patterned plate and the speckled flecks inside certain objects flirt with ornament, but Matisse keeps them subordinated to the architecture of the scene. Their decoration works like spices in a dish—potent in small doses, destructive in excess. By placing the patterned plate near the painting’s warm climax, he lets its blues cool the area just enough, preventing the red wall from overwhelming the right side.
Tactility and Materiality: The Sensation of Things
One of the painting’s great pleasures is how convincingly different materials feel. The melon’s rind is firm and satiny, rendered by broad, slightly glossy strokes. The jug’s body absorbs light, its darkness matte and heavy. The plate catches light along its rim, a quick highlight that feels like the glaze of faience. The figurine is chalky, closer to plaster than marble, and Matisse communicates that by scumbling pale paint so the underlayer peeks through. The table’s painted edge is thick and chipped, like old furniture that knows the weight of daily use. The unity of these sensations arises from the unity of the touch; we trust each object because the same hand, with the same economy, gives each its rightful feel.
The Decorative and the Constructive: Matisse’s Double Aim
Matisse often spoke about seeking an art of balance, purity, and serenity. In “Dishes and Melon,” balance is not passive symmetry; it is the poise of opposing forces—warm versus cool, mass versus void, curve versus plane. Purity is not monotony; it is the stripping away of the inessential so that a few emphatic notes can resound. Serenity is not quietism; it is the calm that arises when every element is in the right place. The painting achieves these aims by letting the decorative beauty of color serve the constructive demands of drawing and composition.
Echoes and Anticipations: Where the Painting Sits in the Oeuvre
This still life sits between the riotous patterned tables of 1906 and the radical condensation of “The Red Studio” in 1911. The bright cloths and luxuriant reds of 1906 are still present, but they are harnessed by a firmer geometry. The thrusting wedge and assertive wall anticipate Matisse’s turn toward interiors in which furniture and wall become planar partners rather than backstage props. Even the measured use of black foreshadows the graphic strength of his later Nice period drawings.
Negative Space and the Breath of the Picture
Equally important are the spaces between objects: the pale wedge of tabletop beside the melon, the crescent of air inside the jug’s handle, the slender light between the figurine and the wall. These voids are not emptiness; they are charged intervals that let the dense notes ring. They create the sense that the still life is not crowded but composed, that each object has room to assert itself without elbowing its neighbor.
Reading the Red Wall: Energy, Light, and Time of Day
The wall’s diagonally hatched ochres at right are more than background decoration. They imply a raking light, as if late sun were glancing across rough plaster, igniting it. The diagonal marks also tilt in counterpoint to the table’s forward thrust, stabilizing the composition. Their frantic pace hints at time—this is not a timeless still life under museum lights but a scene painted in a specific, passing illumination. That sense of temporality keeps the painting from freezing; it breathes.
Sensation Over Description: A Modern Credo
When Matisse abbreviates the plate’s pattern or lets the jug’s far edge melt into the red, he is not being careless—he is privileging sensation over catalog. The experience of seeing requires emphasis and omission; the brain focuses on the important and lets the rest dissolve. The painting adopts this neurological truth as aesthetic method, which is why it feels both truthful and modern.
Why It Matters: The Everyday as Monumental
“Dishes and Melon” demonstrates that the most ordinary items, arranged on a modest table, can achieve the scale of feeling usually reserved for grand subjects. The monumental quality lies not in size or subject but in coherence. Everything participates in a single orchestration. Color carries weight, drawing carries rhythm, composition carries meaning. The painting becomes a lesson in how a room and a few objects can be enough to hold the world.
How to Look: A Slow Circuit Through the Picture
Begin at the front edge of the table, feeling its thickness as your entry point. Let your eye ride the diagonal toward the melon, linger on its stripes, then leap to the patterned plate where cool blues relieve the warmth. Cross back through the lemon and shallow bowl, down to the black jug, and up along the silhouette to the pale figurine. Finally, rest in the red wall’s glow before circling once more. Each circuit clarifies the careful counterweights and reveals new exchanges of color and touch.
Conclusion: Gravity, Radiance, and the Poise of Opposites
In “Dishes and Melon,” Matisse fuses gravity with radiance. The painting has weight—anchored by the melon, the jug, the firm wedge of table—and it has light—flashing off plates, shimmering on plaster, cooling in the window’s blue. Its power lies in the poise of opposites, in a structure so clear that color can speak freely, and in a touch so assured that everyday objects feel newly discovered. This is still life as a modern manifesto, written not with words but with the pressure of the brush and the meeting of red and green across a living surface.