I Saw a Tree Called a "Monkey-Puzzle Tree"

And I saw red lilies, lilies the color of dried blood.

I was on the grounds of the Barnes Foundation, an estate that houses paintings that were collected by a man named Barnes, who was an inventor of some kind of chemical whose name sounds like “argyle.”

His house is set up salon-style, with tremendous numbers of pastel-foggy Renoirs piled on top of many by Matisse and Cezanne. On a wall, imagine three Renoirs with a de Chirico to the upper left, a Van Gogh to the right, and a Tintoretto thrown in for good measure. There will be six other paintings hung like leaves on top of each other just because, not to mention a Christian saint or two from the 15th century. Now imagine room upon room like this, and figure out whether you would stop to study the Rousseau with its foresty depths, or the Soutine with its decrepit figures. (I chose the Soutines more often than not.) It was disorienting at first, and I found myself visibly shaking my head from side to side as I discovered quickly that there was no curatorial rhyme to the arrangement of work. Okay, I thought, see what draws you, and enjoy it.

There are three panels there by Matisse—two struck me deeply for the beauty of the women depicted in them. He had a way of drawing lips that looked like Clara Bow’s and hair that flowed beautifully black.

The one Goya kept me shivering because the man’s face seemed to move and have something new to tell me for each second that passed that I stared at it.

A slightly oversized pink-toned little girl’s head painted by Soutine had me riveted, and vaguely upset.

I ended the day in a garden that had red lilies, lilies the color of dried blood, and I know now, and even knew somewhat then, that I felt content.