Zorah in Yellow was also painted in the early spring of 1912. ‘Zorah’s clasped hands are, in the words of the art historian Remi Labrusse, “a stupefying absence”‘ (Hilary Spurling’s biography of Matisse).

Basket of Oranges also owed something to the rain. (Picasso  loved it and bought it during the Second World War, which is why it is now in the Picasso Museum in Paris.)

At some point it stopped raining and Matisse painted View of the Bay of Tangier. ‘The old part of the city, the medina, is packed around a hill, and the artist chose a spot in the Casbah, the citadel of Tangier, for his view, probably from a terrace…houses and shops are built one against the other, solidly lining narrow, winding streets that snake around a hill. Except for the entry doors, homes rarely open onto the crowded streets. Rather, almost every house has an interior courtyard, which brings light and fresh air into the rooms, and a roof terrace, which affords both an open-air living area and privacy’ (Matisse in Morocco page 62). Things are of course different today, but the Tangier of Matisse is still recognisable.

A holiday in Morocco inspired a visit to the London Library – in order to borrow Matisse in Morocco: The Paintings and Drawings, 1912-13 published by Thames and Hudson in 1990. Henri Matisse arrived in Tangier on 29th January 1912. Much to his dismay, it poured with rain for the next week.’Shall we ever see the sun in Morocco?’ he wrote to Gertrude Stein after a few days. But he ‘kept himself busy by painting a vase of irises in his room, a dark image that makes much of the irregular pattern created by flowers against an ornate dressing table. Only the pale yellow and green stripes reflected in the dressing table’s mirror hint at the extraordinary colours that Matisse was to discover in Tangier when the clouds finally lifted’ (The New York Times).

It has always been a dream to reprint Reunion as a Persephone book but it was not to be. However, we sell (many) copies in the shop. And it is a rather nice coincidence that the Uhlmans were neighbours to two Persephone authors, Amber Reeves and Elizabeth Jenkins. The Uhlmans lived at number 47, Amber Reeves and her husband Rivers Blanco-White lived at number 44 and Elizabeth Jenkins lived across the road at number 8. This 1920s painting by Richard Carline called Gathering on the Terrace at 47 Downshire Hill is at the Ferens in Hull; left to right: Stanley Spencer, James Wood, Kate Foster, Hilda Carline, Richard Hartley, Henry Lamb, and Anne and Sidney Carline. There would have been very similar gatherings in the Uhlmans day – from 1938 until the 1980s.

Fred Uhlman has thirty-four paintings on ArtUK. Near Lyme Regis is at Manchester Art Gallery and was painted in 1948-50.

There was a 1989 film of Reunion which will be shown at Burgh House in April. Here is a still with our friend Sam West (friend because he lives nearby and once did a marvellous lunchtime talk about Howards End, which he is going to repeat one day) and Jason Robards. The Church Times published a piece about Reunion recently in which John Arnold wrote: ‘The best gift from Germany to prose literature is the Novelle, the long short story with its unity of time, place, and subject matter, simple plot, few characters, and concentration on Stimmung— which is an untranslatable word combining mood, atmosphere, and an intangible sense of foreboding and melancholy, of evening mist over a lake in autumn.’ This is very well put: think Hetty Dorval, think Cheerful Weather for the Wedding, think Every Eye.