Henri Matisse

Born in 1869, Henri Émile Benoît Matisse trained as a draughtsman and sculptor but found his edge as a painter. Between 1900 and 1905 his work turned so aggressively chromatic that critics dubbed him and his circle the Fauves — wild beasts. He spent the next decade after 1906 tightening that wildness into something harder: flattened forms, decorative pattern, a rigorous new syntax. In 1917 he moved to Nice, and through the 1920s his work softened enough to win him praise as a guardian of French classical painting. After 1930 he simplified further, paring down to essentials. When illness stoppe…