Henri Matisse

He was a French artist, known for his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but is known primarily as a painter. Matisse is regarded, along with Picasso and Marcel Duchamp, as one of the three seminal artists of the 20th century, responsible for significant developments in painting and sculpture. Although he was initially labelled a Fauve (wild beast), by the 1920s he was increasingly hailed as an upholder of the classical tradition in French painting. His mastery of the expressive language of colour and drawing, displayed in a body of work spanning over a half-century, won him recognition as a leading figure in modern art.

Matisse was influenced by the works of Nicolas Poussin, Antoine Watteau, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, Édouard Manet, and the post-Impressionists Cézanne, Gauguin, van Gogh, and Signac, and also by Auguste Rodin, and Japanese art.[citation needed] 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, Cézanne's Three Bathers. In Cézanne'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.Upon his return to Paris he worked beside lesser known painters such as Jules Flandrin.

With the model Caroline Joblau, he had a daughter, Marguerite, born in 1894. In 1898 he married Amélie Noellie Parayre; the two raised Marguerite together and had two sons, Jean (born 1899) and Pierre (born 1900). Marguerite often served as a model for Matisse.

Field:

painting, printmaking, sculpture, drawing, collage

Training:

Académie Julian, William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Gustave Moreau

Movement:

Fauvism, Modernism

Works

Woman with a Hat (Madame Matisse), 1905 in museums:

   * Museum of Modern Art

   * Barnes Foundation

Patrons:

Gertrude Stein, Etta Cone, Claribel Cone, Michael and Sarah Stein, Albert C. Barnes

Influenced by:

John Peter Russell, Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Signac

Influenced Hans Hofmann, David Hockney, Tom Wesselmann

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matisse

Анри́ Эмиль Бенуа Мати́сс (фр. Henri Émile Benoît Matisse; 31 декабря 1869, Ле-Като-Камбрези, Франция — 3 ноября 1954, Ницца, Франция) — французский художник и скульптор, лидер течения фовистов. Известен своими изысканиями в передаче эмоций через цвет и форму.