Henri Matisse

The liberator of colour.

Matisse led the Fauves, the “wild beasts”, who used colour freely. In old age he cut out shapes from coloured paper.

Henri Matisse was born in 1869 in Le Cateau-Cambrésis in northern France. He trained as a lawyer and worked as a solicitor’s clerk. In 1889, while confined to bed after an appendix operation, he was given a paintbox by his mother, and he decided to become an artist. He studied in Paris, including in Gustave Moreau’s studio at the École des Beaux-Arts.

In his early years he tried out various styles. He bought a small painting by Cézanne, which remained a model for him all his life. In the summer of 1904 he painted with Paul Signac in Saint-Tropez and made Luxe, calme et volupté, a picture in pointillist technique that is today in the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

At the Salon d’Automne in Paris in 1905 Matisse and his friends showed pictures in such strong, free colours that a critic called them “fauves”, wild beasts. Woman with a Hat of 1905 became one of the key works of Fauvism. In the following years he painted Le Bonheur de vivre and, commissioned by the Russian collector Sergei Shchukin, the large canvases Dance and Music of 1909–1910, which are in the Hermitage in St Petersburg.

In 1908 he opened a painting school, the Académie Matisse. Among the pupils were many Scandinavians, including the Swedes Isaac Grünewald, Sigrid Hjertén and Leander Engström. The school was therefore of great importance for Swedish modernism. From 1917 he lived mostly in Nice, where he painted bright interiors and odalisques.

In 1941 he had an operation for cancer and afterwards could no longer stand at the easel. He then began cutting out shapes from painted paper, which he called “drawing with scissors”. The book Jazz of 1947 and the chapel in Vence, which he designed in 1948–1951, are among the works of his last years. He died in Nice in 1954. He is regarded, often alongside Picasso, as the most influential painter of the 20th century.