He was one of the most original creative forces in early 20th-century art. Influenced by Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, and later Cubism, he developed a style characterized by surface pattern, strong, sinuous line, and brilliant colour. Among his favoured subjects were odalisques (women of the harem), bathers, and dancers; for example, The Dance 1910 (The Hermitage, St Petersburg). Later works include pure abstracts, as in his collages of coloured paper shapes ( gouaches decoupees) and the designs 1949-51 for the decoration of a chapel for the Dominican convent in Vence, near Nice. He also designed sets and costumes for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. Matisse's work figures in most of the principal collections of modern art, the largest number of his paintings being in the Moscow Museum of Western Art (enriched by the collections of the Moscow merchants) and the Barnes Foundation, Pennsylvania. He studied law in Paris as a young man, was a lawyer's clerk for a while in his native district but soon went back to Paris to take up painting. He went first to the studio of Bouguereau, then studied under Gustave Moreau at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, receiving a sound academic training. He was attracted towards Impressionism about 1897 and a period of experiment followed. For a while his work was similar in technique to the Intimist paintings of Bonnard, as in La Desserte of 1898. Colour in its various Post-Impressionist aspects, in the work of Cezanne, van Gogh and above all Gauguin, then engaged his attention, and 1904-06 he was associated with a group of like enthusiasts, Marquet, Vlaminck, Derain, Dufy, Rouault, Braque, Friesz and van Dongen. In the famous Salon d'Automne of 1905 the bold flat colour of Matisse and his associates earned them the title of Fauves - "wild beasts". Matisse opened a school 1907, though the students who expected encouragement in wild excesses of paint were told to copy casts and work from nature, and on these admirable but conservative lines the school lasted only a few months. Distortion for the sake of expressing movement and a stridency of colour appear in his famous The Dance, commissioned by the wealthy Russian tea merchant Tschoukine, with its brick-red nude figures against a background of raw blue and green, but Matisse was by nature inclined to measure, tranquillity and refinement in art. The luxurious subtleties of Persian art attracted him about 1910, and in developing a related sense of colour and in a decorative simplification of line and mass, he diverged from the movement which succeeded Fauvism in the limelight, Cubism, for which he had little sympathy. For some years he travelled about the world, but settled at Nice 1917, devoting himself to paintings of Mediterranean interiors, still life and odalisques, characterized by great economy of means, brilliant colour and the free use of textile patterns as a subsidiary decorative element. He made some early essays in sculpture 1899 and in later years resumed the practice of free and unconventional modelling. He also produced etchings, lithographs and wood-engravings and illustrated Mallarme's poems, Joyce's Ulysses and other works. He designed and built the chapel for the Dominicans of Vence, consecrated 1951, a late work of importance in applying an entirely modern decorative sense to a religious interior.
