Goldfish

1912

Oil on canvas, 82 × 93.5 cm. Statens Museum for Kunst (SMK), Copenhagen

Three orange fish in a glass bowl, a small vase of flowers and a pale figure sculpture share a dark tabletop. Painted seven years after the Fauve summer, it shows where that color led.

Look at the bowl: dark blue bands run down the glass, and pink light floats on the water's surface.
A deep plum ground covers most of the canvas, brushed thinly and loosely.
Hot orange appears only in the fish and one flower. The bright color of 1905 is now held to a few accents, and the mood is quiet and somber.
Goldfish bowls recur in his work from 1911 to 1915; another Goldfish of 1912 is in the Pushkin Museum, Moscow.
Once in the Copenhagen collection of Christian Tetzen-Lund, it was acquired by the SMK in 1928.

Image: SMK Open (Statens Museum for Kunst) · Public Domain Mark 1.0