Henri Matisse

FRENCH PAINTER, printmaker and designer; the dominant figure in the Fauvist movement. Initially a lawyer’s clerk, Matisse turned to art in 1890. His first teacher, Bouguereau, was a disappointment, but he learned a great deal from his second master, Gustave Moreau, a Symbolist painter with a taste for exotic colouring. Matisse’s early works were mainly Impressionist or Neo-Impressionist in character but, after painting trips to the Mediterranean, he began to employ more vivid colours; using them to create an emotional impact, rather than simply to transcribe nature.

After years of failure, Matisse and his friends made their breakthrough at the Salon d’Automne of 1905. Critics were overwhelmed by the dazzling canvasses on display and dubbed the group Les Fauves (‘the wild beasts).

Matisse continued to find his greatest inspiration from painting on the Riviera, but he also travelled widely, visiting Morocco, America and Spain. He decorated a chapel in Vence in southern France, in gratitude for a nun who had nursed him, and experimented with ‘cut-outs’ (pictures formed from coloured paper shapes, rather than paint).

Excerpt from Art. The World of Art, from Aboriginal to American Pop, Renaissance Masters to Postmodernism.