Henri Matisse (December 31, 1869 - November 3, 1954) was a French artist, noted for his use of color and his fluid, brilliant and original draughtsmanship. As a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but principally as a painter, Matisse is one of the best-known artists of the twentieth century. Although he was initially labeled as a Fauve (wild beast), by the 1920s, he was increasingly hailed as an upholder of the classical tradition in French painting.
His mastery of the expressive language of color and drawing is apparent, in a body of work spanning over a half-century, and won him recognition as a leading figure in modern art.
Born
Henri-Émile-Benoît Matisse in Le Cateau-Cambrésis, Nord-Pas-de-Calais, France, he grew up in Bohain-en-Vermandois in North-Eastern France, where his parents owned a seed business. He was their first son. In 1887 he went to Paris to study law, working as a court administrator in Le Cateau-Cambrésis after gaining his qualification. He first started painting in 1889, when his mother had 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. He decided to become an artist, deeply disappointing his father. In 1891 he returned to Paris to study art at the
Académie Julian and became a student of William-Adolphe Bouguereau and Gustave Moreau. Initially he painted still-lifes and landscapes in the traditional Flemish style and was quite successful. In 1896 he exhibited 5 paintings in the salon of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, and the state bought two of his paintings. In 1897 and 1898, he visited the painter John Peter Russell on the island Belle Île off the coast of Brittany. Russell introduced him to impressionism and to the work of Van Gogh (who had been a good friend of Russell but was completely unknown at the time). Matisse`s style changed completely, and he would later say `Russell was my teacher, and Russell explained colour theory to me.`
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Influenced by the works of the post-Impressionists Paul Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh and Paul Signac, and also by Japanese art, he made colour a crucial element of his paintings. Many of his paintings from 1899 to 1905 make use of a pointillist technique adopted from Signac. In 1898 he went to London to study the paintings of J. M. W. Turner and then went on a trip to Corsica.
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 often served as a model for Matisse.
