Biography of Henri Matisse

Henri Matisse was born on 1869 France. He studied law in Paris from 1887 to 1888 but in 1891, when he was 21 years old he became ill and which was when he started painting and discovered his love for art.

He then went to Paris to study art at the Académie Julian and then at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts with Gustave Moreau. Matisse show took place at the Galerie Vollard in 1904. His subjects were primarily women and interiors. In 1913, his work was included in the Armory Show in New York. By the year 1923, two Russians, Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morosov, had purchased nearly 50 of his paintings and are now in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow and the Hermitage, St Petersburg.

In 1931, he visited America where he was commissioned to paint murals for the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. In 1948, he designed the decoration of Chapelle du Rosaire at Vence, which was completed in 1951. Major retrospective of his work was presented at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. He traveled to Cleveland, Chicago, and San Francisco. Matisse continued to make large paper cutouts but a design for the rose window at Union Church of Pocantico Hills, New York was his last.

He died on November 3, 1954, in Nice.

Marguerite Wearing a Toque, 1918

Woman Seated in an Armchair, 1940