Henri-Émile-Benoît Matisse (1869 - 1954)
was a French artist, known for both his use
of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship.
He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor,
but is known primarily as a painter.
Matisse is commonly regarded,
along with Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp,
as one of the three artists who helped to
define the revolutionary developments in the plastic arts
in the opening decades of the twentieth century,
responsible for significant developments in
painting and sculpture.
Although he was initially labelled a Fauve
("wild beast"),
by the 1920s he was increasingly hailed as
an upholder of the classical tradition in French painting.
His mastery of the expressive language of
colour and drawing,
displayed in a body of work spanning over
a half-century,
won him recognition as a leading figure in
modern art.
His paintings expressed emotion with wild,
often dissonant colours,
without regard for the subject's natural colours.
