Barnes Foundation — Philadelphia, PA, USA
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The Card Players by Paul Cézanne, 1890
The men at the table were, supposedly, farm workers from his family's estate. He painted this same card game more than once, with fewer players crowded round it each time.
Erisava: The men are the same dusty blue and brown as the wall behind them. On purpose?
The Joy of Life by Henri Matisse, 1906
When this first went up in public the crowd was genuinely angry about it — the colours, mostly, from what I've read. Hard to picture now, people furious at a painting of a picnic. The write-ups I found call it one of the starting points of modern painting.
Erisava: Half of this is coloured outside the lines, and I can't decide if I've been had.
Still Life with Skull (Nature morte au crâne) by Paul Cézanne, 1897
A skull sitting in with the fruit was an old convention — the reminder that you and the pears are both on the clock. He reportedly kept a couple of them in his studio and came back to painting them near the end of his life.
Erisava: That skull's the same yellow as the fruit. Does that make it less grim, or more?