Henri-mile-Benot Matisse was born in Le Cateau-Cambrsis, Nord,
France, he grew up in Bohain-en-Vermandois, Picardie, 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-Cambrsis after gaining his qualification.
He first started to paint 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, and decided to become an artist, deeply disappointing
his father. In 1891, he returned to Paris to study art at the
Acadmie Julian and became a student of William-Adolphe Bouguereau
and Gustave Moreau.
Initially he painted still-lifes and landscapes in the traditional
Flemish style, at which he achieved reasonable proficiency. Chardin
was one of Matisse's most admired painters; as an art student he
made copies of four Chardin paintings in the Louvre. In 1896 he
exhibited 5 paintings in the salon of the Socit 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 le 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.
Matisse was influenced by the works of Nicolas Poussin, Antoine
Watteau, Jean-Baptiste-Simon Chardin, Edouard Manet, and the
post-Impressionists Czanne, Gauguin, van Gogh, and Signac, and also
by Auguste Rodin, and Japanese art. Matisse immersed himself in the
work of others and got in debt from buying work from many of the
painters he admired.
The work he hung and displayed in his home included a plaster bust
by Rodin, a painting by Gauguin, a drawing by van Gogh, and most
importantly, Czanne's Three Bathers. In Czanne's sense of pictorial
structure and colour Matisse found his main inspiration. 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.
Matisse's son, Pierre Matisse, (1900-1989) opened an important
modern art gallery in New York City during the 1930s. The Pierre
Matisse Gallery which was active from 1931 until 1989 represented
and exhibited many European artists and a few Americans and
Canadians in New York often for the first time.
He exhibited Joan Mir, Marc Chagall, Alberto Giacometti, Jean
Dubuffet, Andr Derain, Yves Tanguy, Le Corbusier, Paul Delvaux,
Wifredo Lam, Jean-Paul Riopelle, Balthus, Leonora Carrington, Zao
Wou Ki, Sam Francis, sculptors Theodore Roszak, Raymond Mason and
Reg Butler, and several other important artists, including the work
of Henri Matisse.
