Henri Emile Benoit MATISSE
Henri Matisse was born on Dec. 31 1869 in a tiny, tumbledown weaver's cottage on the rue du Chêne Arnaud n textile town of Le Cateau-Cambrésis. The house had two rooms, a beaten earth floor, and a leaky roof. His father, Émile Hippolyte Matisse, was a great merchant whose family where weavers. While his mother, Anna Heloise Gerard, was a daughter of a long line of well-to-do tanners. throughout the forty years of her marriage, she provided unwavering, rock-like support to her family. when he was ten his father sent him to St. Quentin for lycée (high school).
Anna Heloise ran the section of her husband's shop that sold house paints, making up the customers' orders and advising on color schemes. The colors evidently left a lasting impression on Henri. The artist himself later said he got his color sense from his mother, who was herself an accomplished painter on porcelain, a fashionable art form at the time. Matisse was an awkward youth who seemed ill-adapted to the rigors of the North; in particular, he hated the gelid winters. He was a pensive child and by his own account he was a dreamy, frail and not outstandingly bright.
In later life he never lost his feeling for his native soil.In 1887 he went to Paris to study law, working as a court administrator in Le Cateau-Cambrésis after gaining his qualification.Matisse’s discovery of his true profession came about in an unusual manner. Following an attack of appendicitis, he began to paint in 1889, when his mother had brought him art supplies during the period of convalescence. He said later, “From the moment I held the box of colors in my hands, I knew this was my life. I threw myself into it like a beast that plunges towards the thing it loves.” Matisse was so committed to his art that he later extended a warning to his fiancée, Amélie Parayre, whom he later married: “I love you dearly, mademoiselle; but I shall always love painting more.” Matisse had discovered "a kind of paradise" as he later described it. His drastic change of profession deeply disappointed his father.Two years later in 1891 Matisse returned to Paris to study art.Matisse’s mother was the first to advise her son not to adhere to the “rules” of art, but rather listen to his own emotions.
Anna Heloise ran the section of her husband's shop that sold house paints, making up the customers' orders and advising on color schemes. The colors evidently left a lasting impression on Henri. The artist himself later said he got his color sense from his mother, who was herself an accomplished painter on porcelain, a fashionable art form at the time. Matisse was an awkward youth who seemed ill-adapted to the rigors of the North; in particular, he hated the gelid winters. He was a pensive child and by his own account he was a dreamy, frail and not outstandingly bright.
In later life he never lost his feeling for his native soil.In 1887 he went to Paris to study law, working as a court administrator in Le Cateau-Cambrésis after gaining his qualification.Matisse’s discovery of his true profession came about in an unusual manner. Following an attack of appendicitis, he began to paint in 1889, when his mother had brought him art supplies during the period of convalescence. He said later, “From the moment I held the box of colors in my hands, I knew this was my life. I threw myself into it like a beast that plunges towards the thing it loves.” Matisse was so committed to his art that he later extended a warning to his fiancée, Amélie Parayre, whom he later married: “I love you dearly, mademoiselle; but I shall always love painting more.” Matisse had discovered "a kind of paradise" as he later described it. His drastic change of profession deeply disappointed his father.Two years later in 1891 Matisse returned to Paris to study art.Matisse’s mother was the first to advise her son not to adhere to the “rules” of art, but rather listen to his own emotions.