Henri Matisse

A lawyer until the paintbox

Matisse was born on 31 December 1869 at Le Cateau-Cambrésis, in the far north of France, the son of a grain merchant. He moved to Paris in 1887 to study law and was working as a legal clerk when, in 1889, appendicitis put him in bed for months and his mother brought him a box of paints to pass the time. He later said that from the moment he held it he knew what his life would be.

He returned to Paris in 1891 to train as a painter, first under the academic William-Adolphe Bouguereau, then in the studio of Gustave Moreau at the École des Beaux-Arts — a teacher who told his students to learn from the Louvre but paint what they saw. From 1895 Matisse lived and worked at 19 quai Saint-Michel, with the Seine and Notre-Dame outside the window.

1905: the cage of wild beasts

In the summer of 1905 Matisse painted at Collioure, a fishing port near the Spanish border, alongside the younger André Derain. What they brought back — landscapes and portraits in pure vermilion, viridian and cobalt, colour freed from describing things — hung together in one room at that autumn's Salon d'Automne in Paris, with a conventional Renaissance-style bust by Albert Marque in the middle.

Reviewing the Salon in Gil Blas on 17 October 1905, Louis Vauxcelles wrote that the bust's candour came as a surprise 'in the middle of the orgy of pure tones: Donatello among the wild beasts.' The wild beasts — les fauves — stuck, and Fauvism became the first named avant-garde movement of the century. The most attacked picture in the room was Matisse's portrait of his wife Amélie, Woman with a Hat, her face striped with green and mauve.

Woman with a Hat sold anyway — to the American Stein family, Leo and Gertrude Stein, newly installed at 27 rue de Fleurus. The purchase made the Steins collectors, made their Saturday salon a place where modern painting could be seen when no museum showed it, and kept Matisse painting at a moment when the press was calling his work a hoax. The painting is now in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Matisse and Picasso

At the Steins' apartment in 1906 Matisse met Pablo Picasso, twelve years younger and newly arrived from Barcelona. The two circled each other for the rest of their lives — rivals first, wary friends later, each keeping the other's paintings on his wall. Matisse was the colourist and Picasso the draughtsman, and each raided the other's territory for decades.

The years after 1905 produced the pictures that made his reputation permanent: The Joy of Life in 1906, the great red Dance of 1909–10 painted for the Russian collector Sergei Shchukin, the goldfish and studio interiors of the 1910s. In 1917 he moved south to Nice and its suburb of Cimiez, and the Riviera light ran through the rest of the work.

The second life: scissors

In 1941, at seventy-one, Matisse was operated on for abdominal cancer. The surgery left him unable to stand at an easel for long, and he called the years that followed 'une seconde vie' — a second life. Propped in bed or in a wheelchair, he cut painted paper with scissors and directed assistants to pin the shapes to the wall: the cut-outs, which occupied him to the end. The Swimming Pool, Blue Nude II and the book Jazz all came from the scissors.

From 1943 he lived at Vence, in the hills above Nice, where between 1948 and 1951 he designed the Chapelle du Rosaire for the Dominican nuns — windows, vestments, murals and all — and called it his masterpiece. He died in Nice on 3 November 1954, a month short of eighty-five, and is buried at Cimiez.