Henri Matisse

Henri Matisse was the leading colourist of twentieth-century painting and Picasso's great rival and counterweight. Born in Le Cateau-Cambrésis in northern France in 1869 to a grain merchant, he trained as a lawyer and worked as a court clerk. At twenty, recovering from appendicitis, his mother gave him a box of paints; he later said he had found a kind of paradise. He studied under Gustave Moreau in Paris, copied at the Louvre, and worked through impressionism and pointillism before the breakthrough of 1905. That autumn he and André Derain exhibited canvases of violent unmodelled colour at the Salon d'Automne, and a critic called them fauves — wild beasts. Woman with a Hat, bought by Gertrude and Leo Stein, was the most attacked picture in the show. His central conviction was that colour need not describe an object to be true to it. Dance and Music, painted for the Moscow collector Sergei Shchukin in 1909-10, reduce figures to flat vermilion against blue and green. He travelled to Morocco in 1912-13, and the light and pattern he found there fed into the decorative interiors of the 1920s in Nice — odalisques, wallpaper, screens and open windows, in which pattern competes with figure on equal terms. Abdominal cancer surgery in 1941 left him mostly confined to bed and a wheelchair. He then invented his final method, cutting shapes directly out of gouache-painted paper with scissors — drawing with colour, as he put it — producing Jazz and the Blue Nudes. He designed the Chapel of the Rosary at Vence, completed in 1951, and considered it his masterpiece. He died in 1954.

• Lived: 1869 CE – 1954 CE
• Nationality: French
• Roles: painter, sculptor