Did China, rather than Morocco, inspire famous goldfish paintings by French artist Henri Matisse?

Among the first was Goldfish (Les poissons rouges). Idyllic, sumptuous, it is one of Matisse’s most reprinted pictures, and his first with goldfish. Three more would follow and, by the end of 1914, eight major canvases would portray the colourful fish.

In the winter of 1921-22, he returned to the motif for a final three goldfish paintings. All are held by major museums, where they are collection highlights.

But from where did these fish suddenly spawn in Matisse’s mind? The commonly accepted answer says Morocco, stemming from a comment that the artist himself once made about seeing Moroccans staring into bowls of goldfish.

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But while researching Matisse’s time in Tangier over the past few years, this always seemed suspect. I never saw anything to back it up beyond Matisse’s own dubious statement.

In early June, I again asked around Tangier and received the same single-word response as always: “Impossible.”

So there had to be another possibility …

Fish as a decorative theme had been popular in China since the Neolithic period, and can be seen as early as the 4th century BC. In the Taoist tradition, fish are an example of a creature that achieved happiness by being in a state of harmony with the environment, and golden carp appear frequently on scrolls and ceramics.

Goldfish were domesticated in ancient China from crucian carp, silver and red scales first appearing during the Jin dynasty (AD265-420). But it was during the Tang dynasty (AD618-907) that they were selectively bred for ornamental ponds.

Then, at the beginning of the 17th century, goldfish were introduced to Japan and then Europe, where they quickly became popular. But while commonplace in homes, goldfish had hardly appeared in European art.

Reviewing the 1911 Salon des Artistes Français, Guillaume Apollinaire, one of the most influential critics of the early 20th century, credited their appearance to some now-forgotten gallery shows that had introduced the French capital to Chinese art, the first of which took place in Matisse’s own gallery, and the other just minutes away.

Everyone in the city’s cultured circles seemed to have visited the shows. Even the reclusive Marcel Proust ventured out from his cork-lined room to have a look.

And so after all the historical certitude of Tangier, could Matisse’s mysterious goldfish obsession have Chinese rather than Moroccan roots? Even Apollinaire wrote after the shows that the “cyprinoids are in fashion this year because of the Chinese exhibitions”.

In the early 1900s, Japonisme was the French inter­pretation of Far East aesthetics that followed Japan’s opening to Western trade in 1854, having been closed for more than two centuries.

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The use of bright colours, having an affinity with the natural world and finding beauty in utilitarian objects such as tea sets deeply affected French arts and crafts, from Impressionist painters to art nouveau architects.

Far less known in France was Chinese art, at least beyond heavily ornamented chinoiserie that had become popular in the 1700s.

The Chinese pavilion at the 1900 Paris Exposition offered hints of China’s wealth in architecture, agriculture and some crafts, but little of its art. That came a decade later, with exhibitions at the Bernheim-Jeune and Durand-Ruel galleries and one that followed at the Cernuschi Museum, “three excellent lessons for Europeans”, wrote Apollinaire in May 1911.

“In all Chinese art, there is a feeling – that is not small minded – for the preciousness of works of art, an admirable refinement devoid of affectation.”

A few months earlier, Apollinaire had reviewed the first with this headline: “Chinese Raphaels and Rembrandts – Mme. de Wegener’s Famous Collection Is Exhibited in Paris”.

Showcasing some of German collector Olga Julia Wegener’s pieces, the Bernheim-Jeune exhibition was largely paintings (including scrolls), but there were also a couple of terracotta figures.

The monthly L’Art et les artistes magazine found an ingenious simplicity hidden behind an impeccable science of technique. “Nothing is missing, but nothing is too much. No clutter of decor: the essentials. No anecdote, but the terrible psychological concentration that comes from the deepest observation without any intervention of the painter’s will. Respect for nature with a sense of synthesis. And what decorative sense! And what a mystery!”

Just after, the nearby gallery of Claude Monet’s dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel, offered “Peintures Chinoises Anciennes”, with 117 works from the collection of Florine Langweil, a highly regarded Parisian dealer in Asian antiquities.

On the front page of Le Figaro, the paper’s esteemed art critic, Arsène Alexandre, wrote, “The exhibition of Chinese paintings […] will be the decisive revelation, marvellous, of an art as grandiose, as profound, as consoling as that of the most radiant epochs and of the most venerated masters. This event is a date to remember and register.

“For the first time, with an amplitude that one could not foresee, we have the notion of this august and suave sun of Chinese art, which had not yet appeared without mists and without clouds in our hemisphere.”

Matisse may have seen goldfish as the common subject and decorative theme for Chinese pottery ... Yet we cannot be certain that there is any direct trace of influence

The Paris edition of The New York Herald called Alexandre’s lofty praise “well-deserved” because “no art lover, whatever his preferences, can remain indifferent to such works”.

And then in spring came a retrospective exhibition of Chinese objets d’art at the Cernuschi Museum, founded in 1898 by Henri Cernuschi and today largely devoted to Chinese antiquities.

The show included pottery, jade and amber pieces, ancient carved tombstones, rugs and rare terracotta figures.

Appealing to the French sensibilities of the time, critics reported prominently on its strong influence on Japanese art.

“I would like, in closing, to point out a consideration of capital importance,” Alexandre wrote in Le Figaro. “It is now obvious that the delicious, intoxicating Japanese art proceeds from this art, from this august, serene and profound art.”

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Of the Bernheim-Jeune exhibition, L’Art et les artistes reported, “Japanese art is a deviation, a corruption of Chinese art, which was the first, the most ancient and the purest of all those of the Far East, just as Egyptian art was the first and purest of all those of antiquity.”

While offering Chinese art high praise and profound credit, one of the most immediate consequences of the exhibitions was considered to have been, somewhat surprisingly, the sudden appearance of goldfish paintings.

Within months of his laudatory reviews of Chinese art, Apollinaire was already complaining. In detailing the rooms in the large Salon des Artistes Français show at the Grand Palais, Apollinaire wrote, “Room 13 […] The Arab scene by Anna Morstadt is excellent. I am less fond of Marguerite Delorme’s little girl looking at goldfish.

“We have seen an awful lot of goldfish at this year’s exhibitions! […] Room 22 […] Here are some greenish deliquescences by P. Marcel-Béronneau, and some more goldfish. They are by M. Fernand Toussaint […] Room 40. Here is a very handsome landscape by Nozal and more goldfish by Euler. Really, it is an obsession!”

Yet for all of the goldfish canvases in Paris, only those done by Matisse are remembered today.

In the first, Goldfish (Pushkin Museum, Moscow), the fish are the complete focus of the work. Situated outdoors, the fish peer out of their bowl directly at the viewer, providing perhaps a metaphor for viewing and contemplation.

A marked change came that spring as the bowl moved inside to become part of a trio of objects in meditations on Matisse’s artist studio – his quiet, controlled space between the real and painted worlds – and on the act of painting.

All three include a goldfish bowl on a work table beside a sensual reclining nude sculpture of his wife, Amélie, and a vase of flowers. In Studio with Goldfish (Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia), the bright spring light of the garden outside is glimpsed through a gridded, opaque blue window and an open door, in contrast to the cool colours of the interior.

There is a hint of the exotic here: a green robe draped over a screen, a portrait of a young woman in a yellow robe painted in Morocco that previous winter and the goldfish, done as submarine dashes of brilliant orange.

The companion Goldfish and Sculpture (Museum of Modern Art, New York) is the same size but brighter blue, more abstract and more aquatic. In his garden atelier, Matisse did a final one that spring, Goldfish (National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen), with a tighter focus on the trio of elements and given a smouldering intensity that demonstrates how effectively Matisse used colours to create moods.

In the autumn, Matisse returned to Morocco, and goldfish prominently appear in two of the canvases done during his four-month sojourn.

In Zorah on the Terrace (Pushkin Museum, Moscow), a young girl kneels on a blue carpet. Beside her sits a large glass goblet with three smoky flashes of ruddy-orange goldfish and a pair of red-lined, golden-yellow babouches, as if she had slipped them off to pray.

Staring directly ahead at the artist, she clasps her hands in front of her, but they are a blur, moving like the fish inside the bowl as if unsuccessfully trying to hold herself tight.

Her enigmatic expression gives little away, and certainly nothing of the situation of being a young prostitute unable to leave the city-run brothel where she lived and worked. Matisse painted her on the roof terrace between clients.

Like the fish in the bowl, she is trapped in her existence.

Matisse’s final painting from that stay is the masterpiece Moroccan Café (Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg). The meditative, greenish-blue work consists of half a dozen turbaned figures with anonymous faces.

In the foreground and the focus of the work, two men sit close and stare in deep contemplation at a glass bowl with a pair of orange goldfish alongside a vase of red flowers. The canvas shimmers with heat and drowsy stillness. Time itself feels suspended.

Pushed to the verge of abstraction, it is the surface of memory spread out like a tableau. With it, wrote his foremost biographer, Hilary Spurling, “Matisse had reached a pitch of abstract purity and intensity unprecedented at that point in the West.”

When Matisse returned to Paris in the spring of 1913, he immediately held an exhibition at the Bernheim-Jeune gallery with new works from Tangier. Discussing the genesis of Moroccan Café with the collector, critic and politician Marcel Sembat, Matisse said, “I have my bowl of goldfish and my rose flower. That’s what struck me! These great devils who remain contemplative for hours in front of a flower or goldfish.”

Sembat repeated this comment in a lengthy review of the show, ultimately leading to the up-to-now-accepted generalisation about Moroccans gazing for hours at goldfish, with most critics, historians and museums – even some of those august institutions who hold the goldfish works themselves – crediting this reported sight as being behind Matisse’s goldfish.

In Morocco, there was a tradition of collecting birds in cages, but not goldfish, nor aquariums in general. And glass bowls were not yet prominent (Morocco was a country of pottery).

Matisse certainly could have seen goldfish in Tangier, but it would have most likely been in a Jewish home or that of a foreigner: in the population of just over 46,000 in 1911, there were 12,000 Moroccan Jews and 9,000 foreigners.

The Paris-based Moroccan curator and art critic Mouna Mekouar suggests one plausible scenario, with Matisse seeing a bowl of goldfish in the Tangier home of a Moroccan Jewish family celebrating Mimouna.

Traditions for this holiday at the end of Passover involve adorning the table with talismans of good luck and fertility, including a bowl of live goldfish. Mimouna took place during the end of Matisse’s first stay in Morocco (and just weeks before the first goldfish painting appeared). Perhaps the sight of ordinary goldfish in such an exotic setting triggered something in Matisse?

His own explanation about seeing them in a cafe is particularly curious because his letters and sketches from the time don’t support it. Matisse first discovered the cafe in the autumn of 1912, at the beginning of his second Tangier stay – that is, after he had already done four goldfish paintings – and took to stopping by in the afternoon.

Matisse wrote at length about the place to his wife in France and of an idea for a canvas based on it. He included four sketches showing the men, instruments, slippers, birdcages hanging from the ceiling and coffee glasses on the floor – but no goldfish (or flowers).

Goldfish do not appear in the preparatory sketches for the painting either, nor in any of the many dozen sketches he did during his two winters in Morocco that were published with the major, four-stop 1991-1992 “Matisse in Morocco” exhibition.

His friend Charles Camoin often accompanied him to the Tangier cafe, but there are no goldfish in Camoin’s detailed painting of the place, either.

Wanting to look closer at the Chinese angle, I reached out to specialists at Christie’s Hong Kong. Was there something in Matisse’s goldfish paintings that could reflect a Chinese approach or traces of possible influence?

“Matisse may have seen goldfish as the common subject and decorative theme for Chinese pottery or other export crafted goods,” responded Sonia So, senior researcher of post-war and contemporary art. “Yet we cannot be certain that there is any direct trace of influence, especially as the way Chinese masters depict goldfishes is usually in pond settings (aerial view) or without any frame.

“They also like to take the subject out of the context and focus on the movement and details of it.”

In talking about any Chinese links for Matisse’s goldfish, the conversation usually happens in reference to Sanyu (1895-1966), one of China’s most expensive artists. In the 1920s and ’30s, while living in Paris, Sanyu did a stunning series of goldfish paintings.

In 2020, Christie’s sold one of them, titled Goldfish, for a staggering HK$146 million, a record for the artist’s animal-themed works. This painting is frequently compared to Matisse’s Goldfish.

While the subject matter of the two was the same, So says there are many differences in Sanyu’s goldfish.

“Though they are swimming in a tube,” she says, “there is no trace of water thus they can also be interpreted as a pattern on the surface of a vase or something alike. Sanyu was clearly playing with different perceptions here, like the surrealists, while Matisse’s Goldfish has a more defined setting and is part of a still life.”

Another key difference is with Matisse’s rich colouring, she says. “Sanyu’s has a very minimalistic composition and he only applied a few colours (orange, black and white) in his entire painting.”

In her email, So also points to styles more familiar to Matisse’s goldfish in Chinese pottery, specifically in a rare imperial porcelain wucai fish jar and cover made for the Jiajing Emperor (reigned 1522-1566) that Christie’s sold in 2017 for HK$213.9 million.

Wucai (meaning “five enamels”) is a decorating style for Chinese porcelain that generally uses an underglaze of cobalt blue and then overglazes of red, green and yellow enamels. While there is a limited range of colours, their complex schemes require at least three firings.

On this particular jar, the vibrancy of the golden fish (ie, signifiers of great wealth) comes from applying iron-red enamel over yellow enamel.

According to Chen Liang-lin, a specialist in Chinese ceramics at Christie’s Hong Kong, the composition of the designs on this piece is “deceptively simple”. A continuous frieze of goldfish swim among aquatic and lotus plants with jewel-like blue leaf tips encircling the bottom.

“All elements have been thoughtfully positioned to create a visual balance and rhythm, and there’s an emphasis on the interplay of complementary colours, sizes and shapes.”

Such a description could be easily applied to Matisse’s goldfish, especially the original one.

“In Eastern society and culture, goldfish are seen as talismans – symbols of peace, happiness, luck and prosperity – invested with special meanings of beauty and harmony,” noted the lot essay for the Christie’s auction of the Sanyu. Matisse never imbued his goldfish with such auspiciousness. And while never losing their exotic touch, brilliant colour or sense of movement, the goldfish invite a shifting variety of readings, particularly evident in the two paintings from 1914.

That spring, Matisse painted what is widely considered one of his seminal works, Interior with a Goldfish Bowl (Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris).

Rather than returning to Morocco for a third consecutive winter of painting, he had taken a studio in central Paris, on Quai Saint-Michel.

In a room filling with bluish twilight, a large cylindrical aquarium with two floating orange fish sits on a small table. Out of the window, the old city below glows in the last of the afternoon light as people move across a bridge over the Seine. This is Matisse’s miniaturised world, separated from the city below by glass, and trapped within the stillness of his own tank-like room.

Soon, the escape that window offered was lost. At the end of June 1914, war engulfed Europe. Matisse was keen to enlist but was rejected after failing his medical exam. His work came to a virtual halt.

In December 1914, Matisse wrote to his friend Camoin: “I made a painting, it’s my painting of Les poissons rouges [Goldfish] which I am redoing with a character who has the palette in hand and observing (brown-red harmony).”

Matisse included a sketch, a self-portrait of the artist seated with a palette in hand in front of a bowl of goldfish. In the final version of Goldfish and Palette (Museum of Modern Art, New York), the artist has virtually disappeared. Only a finger looped through the palette can be seen.

The canvas reflects both the feeling of isolation as well as artistic struggle. There are no views of the city below, no glimpses of brilliant golden light, the city or even any other people. In his studio in the heart of Paris, Matisse is fully cut off.

Far from the jolly colours and relaxing mood of the original Goldfish, it is the most intense canvas with goldfish, and also his most personal. It is the only one where the painter is himself present, even if only his finger.

Within a few years, Matisse left Paris to winter and then eventually live in Nice. It was here, in the south of France, with his 100 or so odalisque paintings, that he found lasting fame, security and, with his first canvas belatedly entering a public French collection in 1922, official institutional acceptance.

In the autumn of 1921, after three years of living in hotels, he moved into a flat on Place Charles-Félix, near the flower market and the Promenade des Anglais. That winter, he did three final goldfish paintings.

Two of them are nearly identical canvases of his model Henriette Darricarrère sitting at a table topped with a goldfish bowl and pine bough. In Young Woman before an Aquarium (Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia) and Woman before an Aquarium (Art Institute of Chicago), she leans in with her elbows on the table, staring with rapt attention at the fish.

While goldfish might have been ordinary, deeply common and a favourite of children even in Matisse’s day, there remains something elementally pleasing in watching their slow graceful movements – the swishing flicker of the tail, dazzling, shiny scales. With her dazed expression, Henriette is entranced in wistful wonder.

Perhaps a coda for Matisse’s goldfish works as well, the lot essay for the Christie’s Jiajing fish jar quotes the inscription by Zhou Dongqing on his paper scroll painting from 1291, held in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York:

Not being fish, how do we know their happiness?

We can only take an ideal and make it into a painting.

To probe the subtleties of the ordinary,

We must describe the indescribable.