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Henri Matisse was born on December 31st 1869 in northern France. This is the story of an artist who began as an unremarkable law clerk and ended his life as the painter who led the 20th century into a new experience of color. Matisse was nearly 21 before he picked up a paintbrush for the first time and his most radical paintings were still over a decade away. When he finally allowed painterly expression to reign free, critics called him and his colleagues wild beasts. And if today we are sometimes led to think of Matisse as a charming decorative painter of bright and dazzling canvases, then the details of his life reveal a fascinating other side. His biographer Hilary Sperling described him as one of the most reckless and rashest human beings that have ever existed, with a passionate heart which led him from the beginning. Today Matisse stands as one of the great liberators of modern art, a provincial clerk who became one of the great artists of the last 200 years. How did he get there? Matisse was born on New Year's Eve 1869 in the small textile town of Le Cateau Combresse in northern France. He was the eldest son of a comfortably well-off grain merchant and shop owner with enterprising ambitions. The initial expectation was that Matisse would take over the family's expanding business. He was acutely aware of his father's stern wishes and in 1887 he went to Paris to study returning home to work as a court administrator. Yet in 1889, while recovering from a bout of appendicitis, a new calling came. While in hospital, a fellow patient who was painting Swiss landscapes from colour postcards suggested Matisse occupy himself with the same pursuit. His mother, a porcelain painter herself and who ran the household paint side of the shop, bought Henri a box of oil paints to pass the time. It was a transformative moment. He later described it as the beginning of a kind of intoxication, a feeling that this was the life he was meant to live. Having earlier realised his natural aptitude for drawing, Matisse secretly enrolled in free art classes, fitting them in around a new law job he took once his health had recovered. But it wasn't long before he abandoned the law altogether and travelled back to Paris to study art, with neither money nor formal training to his name. The year was 1891 and Matisse was 21 years old. His father was furious, warning him that painting is for starving vagabonds and largely cut off his financial support. Undeterred, Matisse enrolled first at the Académie Julian, but found the tuition too rigorous for his drawing talents, which was still at a rudimentary level. He later found his way into the studio of the painter Gustave Moreau at the École des Beaux-Arts, an unconventional teacher who pushed his students away from safe technique and towards their own painterly instincts. Matisse was a student there for no less than six years, all the time leading a precarious hand-to-mouth existence with barely any money to his name. He later recalled that his Paris years felt like he was stumbling in a dark wood, with no idea of his direction. At Moreau's school, he fell in with a small circle of painters, including Georges Rouleau, Albert Marquet and Jean Pouilly, friends and collaborators who would remain bound to him for years to come. For a long while, Matisse painted in a fairly conventional, representational manner, and generally kept to a muted colour palette, drawing inspiration from such predecessors as Chardin, Poussin, Poitou and Manet. He avidly copied works from the Louvre, honing his artistic eye and technique, including making versions of Chardin's Still Life of Escape, which Matisse painted no less than four times. It was a long apprenticeship. But something interesting was beginning to happen, despite his personal doubts, which was strong and abiding. In 1896, he had five paintings accepted into the prestigious Salon, two of which, remarkably, were bought by the French state. Pushing himself harder, Matisse spent three summers on the rugged island of Belle-Isle-en-Mer, off the coast of Brittany. Here, he met the Australian Impressionist painter, John Russell, who had been a personal friend of Vincent van Gogh, and who introduced Matisse to the Dutchman's work, as well as to the colour theories of Impressionism. It was the impetus that Matisse needed, easing him, bit by bit, away from his dark traditional colour palette and towards new and brighter horizons. With new strength of purpose entering his paintings, Matisse's circle of fellow Parisian students began to rally around him, drawn by his dedication and the shared sense that they were pushing French painting into uncharted territory. Alongside his art, Matisse's personal life was also taking shape, if somewhat unconventionally. In 1894, he had a daughter, Marguerite, with one of his long-term models, Camille Joblo. Later, in 1898, he married Amélie Perret, after they met at a wedding feast. She was 25 years old, he was 28. They had two more children and raised all three offspring together. For their honeymoon, they went to the island of Corsica, where they found cheap lodgings on the outskirts of Ajaccio, the capital of the island. They would spend the next six months there, experiencing the Corsican landscape. Matisse made 55 paintings during his stay, struck especially by the brightness of the sun and the potency of the sky and sea. The blue sea, blue, so blue, that one would eat it, he wrote to a friend. By the time he returned to Paris, a new instinct had firmly established itself in his working method, defined by a confidence in unnatural colour schemes to capture a scene with an emotional pitch. In the meantime, facing ongoing financial strain, Amélie opened a modest hat shop in Paris to provide much-needed income for the growing family, who lived in a tiny attic apartment directly above the store. Matisse pushed on defiantly. One painting made at this time was a vividly composed composition that used deep lilac purples, oranges, yellows and heavy greens to break the scene down into flat, independent patches of colour. Yet his artistic future remained precarious. He went for long stretches without selling a single canvas, so that by 1900 he was forced to take a low-paying job as a decorator for the 1900 Paris World Fair. His mood was often turbulent, moving between states of intense anxiety, economic depression and ferocious determination to continue his artistic goals. Further difficulties arrived in 1902, when Amélie's parents became caught up in a major financial scandal, in which they were accused of abetting a massive fraud scheme orchestrated by their employers, Frédéric and Thérèse Umbert. And although they were innocent of any wrongdoing, the episode nearly destroyed the Pereira family. As a result, Matisse found himself the sole breadwinner for an extended household of seven. The weight on him was now greater than ever, and sleepless nights were frequent. Then, in 1904, a major breakthrough came about. Under the influence of the pointerless technique pioneered by the likes of Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, Matisse evolved his painting style towards a method of dots and dashes. This shift owed something to Signac's essay From Delacroix to Neo-Impressionism, which Matisse had read a couple of years earlier, and which pushed him towards a divisionist technique. In the autumn of 1904, after a summer spent in the southern coastal town of Saint-Tropez, he produced Lux Karma Evolutae, meaning Luxury, Peace and Pleasure, a line taken from a Baudelaire poem. With Cézanne's bathers and Gauguin's Tahitian colour in mind, it was an idealised coastal bathing scene and a brand new departure for Matisse, one that severed the old link between subject and naturalistic representation. The effect on his peers was electric. The painter Raoul Dufé later said that standing in front of the canvas, he suddenly understood a whole set of For Matisse, this was just the beginning. By 1905, Matisse had found two essential collaborators, André Duran and Maurice du Vlaminck, painters based in the town of Château, on the western edges of Paris. Duran and Vlaminck had met by chance on a train in 1900 and shared a rented studio ever since. Vlaminck, a former professional cyclist and nightclub violinist, claimed to have no formal training at all. Duran, for his part, declared that colour was for the expression of pure emotion, rather than for the transcription of nature. Duran and Vlaminck were also drawn to African sculpture, gathered from Paris's ethnographical museum. It was reportedly in Duran's studio that Matisse and a young Pablo Picasso first encountered an exposure that would profoundly affect both artists' later work. In the summer of 1905, Matisse and Duran travelled to Collioure, a small fishing village just a few miles north of the Spanish border on the Mediterranean Sea. The light was dazzling, the beach teemed with fishing boats. Matisse and Duran spent their days exploring the beaches and inland foothills in search of subjects to draw and paint. What they produced would go on display in the autumn of 1905, when Matisse, Duran and Vlaminck, alongside fellow painters Marquet, Rouault and Pouilly, showed their work at the Salon d'Automne in Paris, one of the most closely watched and progressive exhibitions of the season. Visitors walked into rooms filled with canvases of startling, untamed colour. Among the works on view was Matisse's open window, Collioure, a view through shutters, onto boats and sky, rendered in a jostling patchwork of tones that bore little relation to how the scene might have actually looked. Another work was Woman with a Hat, a portrait of Amélie presented in a circus of untrammeled colour. Reviewing the show for a zine, one critic reached for a phrase that would outlive him. He described the room as full of wild beasts. The label stuck. From that moment, the group had a name, Les Feuves, and a reputation. Not every observer was kind. One critic compared the paintings to the naïve barbaric play of a child let loose with a new box of crayons. But the hostility was not universal. The exposure also brought Matisse to the attention of the Stein family, wealthy American art collectors, with Gertrude Stein at their centre, who became important patrons, offering him a much-needed financial lifeline. Within a few years, the Feuves group had scattered in different artistic directions. Only Matisse continued pursuing the dreamlike, lyrical instincts that Feuvesism had fixed in him, carrying the language forward for the rest of his career. His aims were now set, to create an overall harmony across the canvas, deliberately unnaturalistic, deliberately subjective. In 1908, he summarised his guiding principle, that a work of art should be harmonious in its entirety, since superfluous detail only crowds out what truly matters in the mind of the viewer. That same year, he completed the Harmony in Red, a major canvas that folded together pattern, flatness and colour into a single unified field, table and wall merging into one continuous red plane, dotted with the curling forms of a decorative trellis. Its ingenious effects, the collapsing of space into a panorama of sensory delight, would echo forward into other artists' work across the continent, opening up Over the next few years, Matisse worked obsessively to refine a mode of painting that could hold its expressive intensity without descending into visual chaos. He produced some key works at this time, most notably his potent and utterly unprecedented Dance II, in which Matisse depicted a ring of five figures in an energetic round of self-contained abandon. He reduced the canvas to just three colours, deep blue for the sky, green for the curving earth, and a terracotta orange for the figures, proving his claim that three colours are enough. When it was first shown, the image drew sharp criticism for its baffling subject matter and what one critic called its willfully crude painting technique. Then came 1911, a year of unrivalled achievement. In the winter before, he travelled to Seville in Spain and hired a studio for a month. He'd already toured the cities of Granada and Córdoba, both home to magnificent Moorish palaces and mosques. On his travels, he collected decorative carpets and absorbed the arabesque designs of the Alhambra in Granada and the Great Mosque of Córdoba. He relished the winter sun and felt creatively charged by all he saw, but it wasn't all joyous. He was plagued by a nervous tension and he often slept poorly and increasingly missed his wife, Amélie. She, for her part, was frustrated by his absence during a cold winter back home in northern France. When Matisse decided to stay in Spain for a second month, determined to produce work of value, she suspected him of both indifference to his family and a betrayal of his marriage. Favourable news arrived in the form of a commission from one of his newest patrons, the Russian businessman Sergei Shukin. Shukin, a pioneering collector of post-impressionist art, first noticed Matisse's work at the Salon of 1905. However, it was upon seeing the monumental painting The Joy of Life at the 1906 Salon of Independence that Shukin was more deeply moved, prompting him to visit Matisse's studio and quickly become one of his most vital patrons. Matisse threw himself into the commission, which occupied him for his final weeks in Spain and for most of 1911 back in France. What he produced would be some of the most arresting, personal and ambitious images of his career. Four large paintings, the biggest reaching two and a half meters in width. The first was The Pink Studio, where his naive delight in the fruitful textures and forms spilling across his studio space is expressed with giddy exuberance, an extension of the still life tradition, but grander and more encompassing. Every corner of the canvas made to contribute to the whole and the rich Islamic patterns he'd found in Spain translated into decorative fecundity. The painter's family from the same year gives a mesmerizing insight into his evolving sense of textural possibility. It shows his two sons playing chess, his daughter holding a yellow novel and his wife sewing on the sofa. A dizzying inventory of pattern pressed close together, a dream of harmonious, joyously chaotic family life. Interior with Aubergines, painted in a rented studio in Collioure at the end of the summer, came next. It shows a series of clashing textures that excite the eye with floor and wall dissolving into invented pattern and a small still life of aubergines and apples offering a moment of stillness amid the visual excitement. These paintings were Matisse's attempts to answer the question of space. Was there a way to use colour to describe the dimensions of a room? Could a flat wash of red or pink stand in for perspective, foreshadow, for the ordinary business of describing where one service ends and another begins? The red studio completes what has become known as the symphonic interiors. It is even more sensational than the others. A full-throated sway of red in which spatial depth is barely hinted at except through the rectangular canvases and picture frames that punctuate the room like colourful apertures. A table, chair, chest of drawers and grandfather clock all but subsumed into the red pool. I want to reach that state of condensation of sensations which constitutes a picture. Matisse wrote of his method, meaning in practice that he would rework canvases obsessively, stripping back colour and space down again and again until only the essential charge remained. Across all four paintings, the assertive patterns and textures threaten, in each case, to overwhelm the image. Matisse's courage was to embrace the risk of bedlam and wrestle it into coherence. Matisse's working life through the 1910s, 20s and 30s did not slow. He travelled to Morocco, to Tahiti, to the United States, gathering light and pattern that fed directly into his canvases. Interiors, portraits and decorative still lives filled his output, each one searching for that same balance between sensation and structure that had defined his work since Collioure. Yet now his paintings were moving towards an even more extreme sense of distillation. His work was also beginning to travel more widely and reactions abroad could be fierce. When it reached America in 1913, a group of outraged students in Chicago burned reproductions of his paintings on the steps of the Art Institute, accusing him of pictorial arson and total degeneracy of colour. In a letter written late in his career, Matisse confessed his worry that younger artists, looking at his swift, loose brushwork, might mistake it for carelessness. He had always tried, he wrote, to hide his effort so that his paintings carried the lightness of a springtime that gave no hint of the labour behind it. That labour, he insisted, was indispensable. In 1917, tired of the gloomy winters of northern France, he began spending his winters in Nice on the French Riviera, despite the ongoing war. The next two decades proved to be a period of unabated production, as he moved between north and south with the seasons. That rhythm was again broken by war when, in 1943, with the Riviera under threat of bombardment, Matisse left Nice for the inland hill town of Vence. It was here, cared for through a long illness by a young nurse, who later became a Dominican nun, that he took on the project he would call the culmination of his life's work. The design, down to the last stained glass window and vestment, of a small convent chapel. Building began in 1948, it was consecrated in 1951, three years before his death. Matisse called it, in spite of its imperfections, his masterpiece. In his final years, ill health increasingly confined Matisse to his bed and his chair, yet his appetite for invention did not diminish. Unable to paint in the conventional sense, he turned instead to scissors and coloured paper, cutting bold, simplified shapes directly from sheets his assistants had painted in advance. These cutouts, leaves, figures, swimmers, stars, distilled six decades of thinking about colour and form into a single, immediate gesture. He thought of his art as inseparable from a larger sense of wonder. We ought, he once wrote, to look at ourselves with the same curiosity we bring to a tree or the sky, since we too are bound to the whole of the universe. Asked about his faith, he admitted he wasn't certain he believed in God, but felt drawn to something like a Buddhist outlook. The important thing, he said, was to hold oneself in a state of mind close to prayer. Henri Matisse died on the 3rd of November 1954 in Nice, at the age of 84, having worked in paint and paper almost to the very end. His influence is hard to overstate. The fauvist explosion of 1905 had broken something open that couldn't be closed again. The idea that colour need not serve description, that it could carry feeling and structure on its own terms. That idea rippled into German expressionism, into abstraction, and eventually into the American painters who pushed colour even further from the object. Matisse himself never abandoned the visible world in the way that some who followed him eventually did, but he had shown, with extraordinary persistence, that the visible world was only ever a starting point. He came to think of colour relationships as something close to musical terms. A colour is a single tone, he said, but two tones together become a chord, and that, to him, was simply life.