Henri Matisse

1869-1954

Henri Matisse (1869–1954) grew up in northern France and trained in Paris under Bouguereau and Gustave Moreau before a chance encounter with Australian painter John Russell turned him from an earth-toned academic palette toward brilliant colour. Around 1905, alongside André Derain, he led the short-lived Fauvist movement, shocking Salon audiences with paintings like Woman with a Hat and The Open Window, built from raw, unmixed colour. Travels to Algeria, Spain and Morocco fed a lifelong fascination with pattern, ornament and flattened space, visible in works such as The Red Studio and the Shchukin commissions La Danse and Music. Settling near Nice in 1917, he moved toward a calmer, classical style, then toward bolder simplification in the 1930s, and finally, when illness kept him from the easel, into cut-paper collage. A friend and rival of Picasso, Matisse is remembered as one of the defining colourists of modern art, his work held today in major museums worldwide.