Henri Matisse

Henri Émile Benoît Matisse (1869-1954) was a French visual artist, known for his use of colour and original draughtsmanship.

Matisse is commonly regarded as one of the artists who best helped to define the revolutionary developments in the visual arts throughout the opening decades of the twentieth century, responsible for significant developments in painting and sculpture.

 

The intense colours of his works between 1900 and 1905 brought him notoriety as one of the Fauves (French for 'wild beasts'). Many of his finest works were created in the decade or so after 1906, when he developed a rigorous style that emphasised flattened forms and decorative pattern. In 1917, he relocated to a suburb of Nice on the French Riviera, and the more relaxed style of his work during the 1920s gained him critical acclaim as an upholder of the classical tradition in French painting. After 1930, he adopted a bolder simplification of form. When ill health in his final years prevented him from painting, he created an important body of work in cut paper collage.

Matisse was born in Northern France on New Year's Eve in 1869, the oldest son of a wealthy grain merchant. In 1887, he went to Paris to study law, working as a court administrator after gaining his qualification. He started to paint in 1889 after his mother brought him art supplies during a period of convalescence following an attack of appendicitis. He discovered 'a kind of paradise' as he later described it, and decided to become an artist, deeply disappointing his father.

In 1891, he returned to Paris to study art at the Académie Julian under William-Adolphe Bouguereau and at the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts under Gustave Moreau. Initially he painted still lifes and landscapes in a traditional style, achieving reasonable proficiency. 

In 1896, Matisse, an unknown art student at the time, visited the Australian painter John Russell on the island of Belle Ile off the coast of Brittany. Russell introduced him to Impressionism and to the work of Vincent van Gogh, who had been a friend of Russell, and gave him a Van Gogh drawing. Matisse's style changed completely, abandoning his earth-coloured palette for bright colours. He later said Russell was his teacher, and that Russell had explained colour theory to him. The same year, Matisse exhibited five paintings in the salon of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, two of which were purchased by the state.

With the model Caroline Joblau, he had a daughter, Marguerite, born in 1894. In 1898, he married Amélie Noellie Parayre; the two raised Marguerite together and had two sons, Jean (born 1899) and Pierre (born 1900). Marguerite and Amélie often served as models for Matisse.

See our Henri Matisse Video - Artwork in the Public Domain