In April of 1909, a newspaper interview with Henri Matisse recorded his view (quoting Hilary Spurling in her exemplary bio Matisse the Master)
that the invention of photography released painting from the need to copy nature. From now on art was free to condense and synthesise, eliminating surface detail in an attempt to penetrate rather than reproduce reality. He said that the aim of the new art was to ‘present emotion as directly as possible and by the simplest means’ . . .
I have always preferred photographs of humans to painted portraits, not so much because photos possess some greater reality but because they hold so much detail. One can stare at an exquisite facial photograph for ages.
Spurling’s book has a colour plate of Matisse’s 1908 painting The Girl with Green Eyes. I keep coming back to its flat, multicoloured peek into a woman’s soul. Perhaps, after all, paintings can penetrate the skin-and-bone complexity captured by a camera.