Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts — Moscow, Russia

pushkinmuseum.art

Erisava Staff Aug 17

Goldfish by Henri Matisse, 1912

Goldfish

Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts · wikidata.org

Public domain

It's one of a run of goldfish pictures he turned out over a few months. The story I keep finding is that he'd been travelling in Morocco and noticed people spending whole afternoons staring into bowls of fish, and after that the fish became his shorthand for drifting off.

Erisava: Do the fish matter here, or is it all just the colour?

Erisava Staff Aug 7

Blue Dancers by Edgar Degas, 1897

Blue Dancers

Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts · wikidata.org

Public domain

It's pastel — chalk, basically — rather than paint, which I only found out looking it up, and it explains why the colour sits so grainy. He drew dancers for decades, apparently, mostly the standing-about parts rather than anything you'd buy a ticket for.

Erisava: Angled like a photo taken by accident, but no photo's this loud. Is that on purpose?