"What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity, devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter.", Henri Matisse, Notes of a Painter, 1908
Henri Matisse (December 31, 1869 – November 3, 1954) was a French painter, sculptor, draftsman, printmaker, and designer, and, with Pablo Picasso, one of the two artists most central to the development of European modernism. Born in Le Cateau-Cambrésis in northern France, he trained originally as a lawyer before turning to art at twenty-one during a period of convalescence. He studied at the Académie Julian under William-Adolphe Bouguereau and at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts under the Symbolist painter Gustave Moreau, in a class that included Albert Marquet and Georges Rouault, and it was Moreau's openness to individual development rather than school style that gave Matisse the foundation for his later independence.
In the summer of 1905 he and André Derain produced the body of work in Collioure that the critic Louis Vauxcelles, on seeing the paintings at the Salon d'Automne later that year, described in the famous phrase that gave Fauvism its name. From that moment onward Matisse was recognized as one of the leading European painters of his generation. His career, running from the early Fauvist canvases through the great Moroccan paintings, the Dance and Music commissions for Sergei Shchukin, the long Nice years of odalisques and interiors, and the late paper cut-outs, produced one of the defining bodies of work in twentieth-century art, culminating in the Chapelle du Rosaire at Vence (1947–1951), which he designed in its entirety and described as the "fruit of my whole working life." His work is held in essentially every major collection of modern art, including the Centre Pompidou, the Musée Matisse in Nice, the Musée Matisse in Le Cateau-Cambrésis, the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Tate, the Hermitage, and the Pushkin Museum.