Henri Matisse was born in 1869 in Le Cateau-Cambrésis in northern France and came to painting late, abandoning a legal career after discovering art during a convalescence. He studied under Gustave Moreau, absorbed Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, and in 1905 led the explosive debut of the Fauves (“wild beasts”) at the Salon d’Automne, where paintings of unprecedented chromatic intensity — pure, unmodulated colour freed from any descriptive function — scandalized and thrilled the art world.
The Joy of Life (1905–1906) and The Dance (1910) established Matisse’s lifelong concerns: the arabesque of the human body, the expressive power of pure colour, and the creation of a decorative harmony that could, as he put it, be “like a good armchair” — an art of balance, serenity, and pleasure. The Red Studio (1911) took a further radical step, dissolving the walls and furniture of his studio into a single field of saturated red, anticipating Colour Field painting by half a century.
In his last decades, confined to a wheelchair, Matisse invented a new medium: paper cut-outs, in which he “painted with scissors,” cutting shapes from painted paper and arranging them into compositions of astonishing vitality. Blue Nude II and the decorations for the Chapel of the Rosary in Vence represent the culmination of a career devoted to what Matisse called “an art of purity and serenity” — and they rank among the supreme achievements of twentieth-century art.