Science lends fresh perspective to Matisse's goldfish
By Roger Highfield, Science Editor
SCIENTISTS intrigued by an apparent optical error in one of Henri Matisse's best known
paintings have made a new, "corrected" version.
Their amendment of Goldfish, which hangs in the Pushkin Gallery, Moscow, accurately
re-arranges the refracted image Matisse painted in 1911 but has aroused fears in the art world
of an outbreak of "scientific correctness".
Matisse's fish have long troubled Prof Alan Crocker, of Surrey University.
"The refracted image of the fish seen through the flat surface of the water in the tank is totally inconsistent with the image seen through the curved front," he said yesterday. Although Matisse enlarged the front image of the fish to account for the lens effect of the curved bowl "the surface image is wrong," said Prof Crocker. "I've often wondered what it should look like."
To find out, he decided to give Matisse a helping hand with his fishy images by asking Tanvir
Alam, a physics student, to examine the optical principles involved as part of a final year project.
The fish that one can see through the curved part of the bowl were kept where Matisse painted them. Ms Alam then analysed the geometry of the bowl to determine the position from which the artist must have observed it.
She then conducted experiments, using model fish, to recreate what Matisse would really have seen through the top of the bowl. In contradiction to the original, she concluded, not all four fish would have been visible.
The leader of the Fauvist movement, Matisse dreamt of an art that was essentially decorative
in conception, instinctive rather than cerebral and wholly dependent on the feelings of the painter for his subject. Richard Dorment, the Telegraph's art critic, said: "The way things look and the way things really are, are totally separate."
Matisse probably painted the goldfish from real life but the end result "was maybe even a truer reality than what the scientists came up with".
"We are not saying that Matisse was a poor artist," said Prof Crocker, who conducts theoretical work at Surrey on defects in crystals.
He admitted that he is keen to give other artists a hand: "I might get a student to look at some
