Image source: wikiart.org
Introduction
Henri Matisse’s “Still Life after de Heem’s ‘La Desserte’” (1915) is a spectacular negotiation between past and present. The canvas restages a lavish Dutch Baroque banquet—fruit piled high, precious glassware, a silver ewer, a platter with roasted game, a musician’s lute, a tasseled tablecloth—and translates the whole scene into Matisse’s sharp modern language of large planes, iron-black contours, and synchronized color chords. What could have been a literal copy becomes an argument about how pictures are built. It is an homage to Jan Davidsz. de Heem and a manifesto for Matisse’s own decorative ideal: every inch of the surface activated, every object simplified to the shape that carries its identity and rhythmic role.
The Old Master Source And What Matisse Takes From It
Jan Davidsz. de Heem’s sumptuous “La Desserte” epitomizes the seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish penchant for ostentatious still lifes, where gleaming metal, ripening fruit, imported glass, and exotic food staged the wealth and fragility of life. Matisse keeps the essential cast: the raised tazza with lemons, the ornate ewer, a tall lidded cup crowned by a small bird, the cornucopian wicker basket spilling grapes and citrus, a sculpted loaf or roasted bird on a platter, a blue goblet, bottles and bread grouped at the right, and the musician’s lute leaning at the left. He also preserves de Heem’s sense of theatrical setting—arches, shelves, and drapery—that frame the banquet.
What he refuses is illusion. Instead of rendering reflections and textures with microscopic patience, he converts every object into a bearer of mass, color, and rhythmic curve. De Heem’s message about prosperity and transience survives as a different kind of warning: abundance will collapse into clutter unless painting imposes order. Matisse’s order is built from geometry, intervals, and a disciplined palette.
Why 1915 Matters
The painting arrives at a moment when Matisse was measuring his radical prewar experiments against the stability of the Old Masters. In 1913–1914 he had pushed toward austere structures—windows reduced to bars and planes, interiors set in cool grisaille climates, portraits built by severe contours. With war underway, he turned repeatedly to the Louvre and to historical models. “After de Heem” does not signal retreat. It shows a modern artist testing whether the grand decorative promise of Baroque still life can be reasserted in a language of edges, flats, and orchestrated color.
First Look And Layout
From across the room the painting reads as a grand arrangement of triangles and arcs. A long turquoise table sweeps across the lower half, its center slit by a vertical column where a white napkin cascades over a dark void. At left, the ochre lute balances the large fruit basket at right. Dead center rises a tall, dark chalice topped by a little red bird, a vertical that steadies the whole scene like a mast. Behind and above, wedge-shaped architectural planes—pale cream, powder blue, and charcoal—press forward, eliminating deep perspective and turning the background into a series of supporting flats.
Closer in, the feast is distributed with cunning. The lemons on their tazza sit slightly left of center, a bright pivot between the ochres of the lute and the gold of the chalice. The roasted game or loaf forms a horizontal bar across black, the white napkin cutting below it like an exclamation. At right, a sky-blue goblet rides a small pedestal, and a wicker basket bulges with green grapes, citrus, and a dark cluster of grapes. Bottles tucked lower right echo the black structural accents that knit the surface.
The Table As Stage And The Napkin As Actor
Matisse often stages still lifes like theater. Here the table is a proscenium, the white napkin the lead actor. Its immaculate triangle cascades from platter to edge, bright against the central black slit. Brushstrokes curl and fold to imply drape without meticulous modeling; the napkin’s job is to connect the two halves of the table and to bring the eye down from food to edge and back up again. It’s a device he used repeatedly: a white cloth that unites abundance with the painting’s architecture.
Contour, Carpentry, And The Role Of Black
Black lines do the carpentry. They fix the ellipse of the tazza, pin the rim of the wicker basket, and lock the lute to the picture plane. The same black firms the architectural wedges, defines doors and cornices, and articulates the blue goblet’s complex stem with a few decisive strokes. Across the painting, line weight varies—thick and assertive where a form must stand forward, thin and exploratory where Matisse wants air. This use of black is not the Umber of shadow; it is a constructive beam, the skeleton on which color planes can hang.
Color Architecture And Temperature
The palette is at once restrained and festive. Chilled turquoise and dusty blue lay down a cool climate for the tabletop and background planes. Cream, gold, and ochre warm the chalice, lute, and lemons. Coral reds and pomegranate hues punctuate the feast in small, bright hits—peppers, cherries, the bird crowning the cup. Deep greens of foliage and lime echo the cool tabletop but tip toward warmth when they approach the basket’s straw. Matisse avoids naturalistic modulation; instead, he sets temperatures against each other so that each note stays legible. The blue goblet glows because it is the only intense blue, and because black contour and creamy ground frame it. Grapes look ripe because their green and violet sit against the cool, pale wall and the garnet accents of nearby fruit.
Light Without Illusion
De Heem’s shimmering reflections become in Matisse’s hands a system of highlights and reserves. The silver ewer is a complex silhouette with a flash of white on its belly. The chalice and its tiny bird are mostly matte dark, with just enough pale yellow to read as metal under a high light. The glass bowl’s gleam appears as unpainted or lightly scumbled white, often bordered by black so the shine pops. The effect is less the imitation of light and more a choreography of values: light areas placed for rhythm, not for optical exactitude, making the entire surface read as luminous.
Ornament And The Flow Of Arabesque
Ornament, for Matisse, is not garnish; it is structure. The carved shoulder of the ewer, the scroll of the chalice’s stem, the curving ribs of the lute, and the braided rim of the basket all provide arabesques that soften the painting’s architectural wedges. These curvilinear rhythms tie instrument to vessel to fruit, ensuring that the feast is not a pile but a linked choreography. Even the background—those triangular vaults and arched alcoves—bends toward curve, a nod to Baroque architecture translated into planar shorthand.
Music In A Picture About Taste And Sight
The lute is not merely a visual prop; it brings sound into a painting of taste and sight. Positioned in the left foreground, it counterbalances the heavy basket on the right and leads the viewer into the scene with its long, slanting neck. As your eye moves from strings to lemons to loaf to grapes, you experience a suite of senses: resonance, tartness, savor, sweetness. Including a musical instrument also ties Matisse’s project to de Heem’s: both artists celebrate cultivated pleasures while acknowledging their ephemerality.
Objects Reimagined As Emblems
Each object is pared to a few necessary signs. The lemons are flat ovals with a crescent of white for shine. The grapes are clusters of rounded dots unified by a wash. The roasted game is a warm ochre pillow with a few slashes for incision. The blue goblet is a stack of simple curves and disks. These emblems carry all the meaning the painting needs—identity, weight, place—while freeing color and line to do structural work. The more you look, the clearer it becomes that Matisse is not simplifying to be coy; he is simplifying to let relations—scale, interval, rhythm—sing.
Compressed Perspective And Constructed Space
There is space here, but it is shallow and engineered. Planes overlap to assert depth: the napkin overlaps the platter; the platter overlaps the table edge; the chalice overlaps a pale architectural wedge that might be a niche. But perspective convergences are mostly suppressed. Instead, Matisse builds a believable room by stacking verticals and diagonals until the eye accepts the stage. This method maintains the decorative wholeness of the surface while leaving enough depth to accommodate the feast.
Process, Revisions, And Visible Decisions
Look near the central slit, along the white napkin, and at the contour of the chalice: you can see where edges have been moved, where earlier positions have been canceled by a new line. The basket’s rim carries pentimenti that trace Matisse’s search for the right ellipse. The lute’s sound hole shows a telltale halo where paint was pushed and corrected. This history of decision is key to the painting’s vitality. Final firmness reads as earned.
Between Homage And Competition
“After de Heem” is frank homage, but it is also a friendly contest. The seventeenth-century painter dazzled with abundance and verisimilitude; Matisse counters with restraint and structure. Where de Heem used illusion to make viewers feel the sting of time passing—fruit decaying, bubbles bursting—Matisse uses architecture and cadence to argue that painting’s order can outlast abundance. The little red bird perched atop the chalice becomes emblematic of that exchange: a Baroque flourish recast as a sharp modern accent.
Kinship With Matisse’s 1914–1916 Interiors
This still life belongs with the windows and studio scenes of the same years. The black scaffold is a cousin to the bars in “French Window at Collioure.” The blue-green table and milky highlights echo the aquaria of “Interior with a Bowl with Red Fish” and “Goldfish and Palette.” The taste for large, undivided fields—cream at the top left, pale blue in the center, black wedges—reflects Matisse’s broader commitment to graphic clarity. The difference is the deliberate excess of objects, an imported Baroque profusion that tests his modern order and, crucially, survives it.
Anticipations Of Later Work
The simplified emblems of lemons, grape clusters, lute, and leaf anticipate the cut-outs of the 1940s, where a pear or a lyre can be reduced to a shaped color and still carry complete identity. The way the tablecloth’s white falls in a single, cut shape prefigures the paper “knife” he would later use to carve light directly from sheets of gouache. Even the painting’s orchestration of cool fields with hot punctuation rhymes with the late Jazz suite, where color islands dance on calm grounds.
How To Look
Begin by letting the big shapes settle. Feel how the central chalice balances lute and basket, how the white napkin stakes the middle. Move along the tabletop from left to right—lute, lemons, loaf, platter, grapes—and notice how each object takes its role in the rhythm. Climb to the background planes and realize they are not mere scenery but pieces of the same design, tilting and bracing the feast. Drop to the lower right and register the little basin with bottles; see how its stripes rhyme with the lute’s ribs and the basket’s weave. Return to the chalice and its red bird and recognize how that vertical and that tiny accent hold the painting together.
Meaning And Mood
The mood is celebratory but controlled. The architecture and black carpentry prevent decadence from slipping into chaos. At the same time, the red and gold accents keep the surface from chill. It is as if Matisse were saying that pleasure thrives best when supported by form. The work thus retains de Heem’s ethical undertone—pleasures are fleeting—while recasting it: the banquet’s transience is countered by the permanence of pictorial order.
Why This Painting Matters Now
“Still Life after de Heem’s ‘La Desserte’” demonstrates how a contemporary artist can work with history without becoming derivative. Matisse neither copies nor caricatures; he translates. In doing so he offers a model for designers and painters today: locate the structural virtues of a source, preserve the essential cast of forms, and rebuild the whole with a modern grammar of shape, interval, and color. The painting also argues for the continuing relevance of still life as a laboratory of seeing—where the everyday and the opulent can be arranged into a complete, breathing world.
Conclusion
With this dazzling re-composition, Matisse proves that the old language of abundance can converse fluently with the new language of planes and contour. Lemons, grapes, goblet, lute, and lavish drapery become not a nostalgic tableau but an exacting architecture of relations. The painting is both tribute and test: de Heem’s feast submitted to modern discipline and emerging more legible than ever. More than a century on, the canvas remains a tutorial in how to honor a predecessor while speaking in one’s own unmistakable voice.