Matisse was eight days old when his parents moved him the nineteen miles to Bohain-en-Vermandois, where Henri Sr. had purchased a general store selling everything from seeds to silk.
He spends a year (1887-1988) studying law in Paris In August he passes first law examination with honors.
He did not discover art until age twenty, when, convalescing from acute appendicitis, he was given box by his mother.
He gave up a career in law, and in 1892 he moved to Paris to study art, successfully exploring Dutch Old Master paintings, Impressionism, Paul Cezanne and Neo-Impressionism. In Paris he studies with William Bouguereau at the Academie Julian, but in 1892 he left the academie painter to work with Gustave Moreau, who he considered his most important teacher.
His first original picture, Still Life With Books, is painted in June 1890 and signed with his name in reverse: ‘Essitam, H,Juin 90‘.
Encourage by Moreau, Matisse begins to paint copies in the Louvre in April 1893. Over the next decade he copies more than twenty-five works; these include some sixteenth- and seventeenth –century Italian, Dutch and Spanish pictures.
After five decades of work in painting, sculpture, drawing, graphic art and printmaking, Matisse spent the last extremely productive years of his life in Nice, on the French Riviera.
He died in 1954, widely regarded as the greatest French painter the century had produced a judgment that remains unchallenged almost sixty year later.
Biography of Henri Matisse
