A dozen people in winter coats stand with their backs to the camera while a guide talks. Above and behind them, eleven or twelve paintings crowd a single wall in two and three loose tiers, tondos beside rectangles, wide frames beside narrow ones, a Chagall village floating at the far right with its white horse and its enormous eye. Nobody in the photograph is looking at the same picture, and several of them are looking at the guide instead.

Stand in one of the upper galleries and the room does all the work for you. Tall lancet windows throw cold daylight down a rough plaster wall. The roof is open timber. The floor is brick, worn to a warm red. A carved retable sits on a bracket at exactly the height an altarpiece would have sat, and a tapestry hangs beside it, and the whole arrangement reads as a room that has been standing since the fifteenth century.

The big blue canvas reads as a burst of energy. Five figures, a green mound, a flat blue sky, almost no detail, the whole thing apparently thrown down in an afternoon. Visitors treat it that way. They stand back, take the picture, and move on with the impression that Matisse was a man who worked fast and got lucky. Then you turn around and there are the bronze heads on the plinth, the same subject remade over and over, each one further from the last.