49 Fun Facts About Henri Matisse

Matisse led which movement, named after the French for 'wild beasts'?

Fauvism got its name at a Paris salon in 1905, when a critic looked at the blazing canvases hung around one classical statue and joked that it stood among wild beasts.

Which creatures appear in at least nine Matisse paintings, among them a famous 1912 canvas now in Moscow?

Goldfish: on his travels he had watched people sit for hours gazing dreamily into fish bowls, and the creatures became his own emblem of calm.

Matisse first painted at twenty, with a paint box from his mother, while recovering from what?

Appendicitis kept him at home for months; he started by copying the colour prints that came in the box, and within two years he had quit his job to study art in Paris.

What had Matisse studied in Paris before he took up painting?

Law: he qualified in Paris and went home to clerk in a lawyer's office, a job he found so tedious that painting, once he tried it, took over, to the dismay of his merchant father.

Matisse described his late way of making pictures from painted paper as "drawing with" what?

Scissors: assistants brushed sheets of paper with gouache, and he cut straight into the colour, often from his bed, deciding where each shape was pinned.

Under which Symbolist painter did Matisse study at the École des Beaux-Arts in the 1890s?

Gustave Moreau took him into his studio although he had not passed the school's entrance exam, and urged pupils to find their own way instead of copying his.

On Belle Île the painter John Russell showed Matisse the work of which then little-known friend?

Van Gogh had sent Russell twelve drawings from Arles; Russell gave one of them to the young Matisse, who soon dropped his earthy palette for bright colour.

Whose painting Three Bathers did the hard-up young Matisse buy in 1899 and keep for more than thirty years?

Paul Cézanne's small canvas cost Matisse money he did not have; he refused to sell it through his poorest years and later used it to teach his own students.

What name do Matisse's many 1920s paintings of costumed models in his Nice studio go by?

Odalisques are harem women, but his were models in fancy dress, posed in exotic rooms he made himself from screens and fabrics picked up in junk shops.

Which painter worked beside Matisse at Collioure in the summer of 1905 and led the new movement with him?

André Derain and Matisse painted each other's portraits that summer, and the two pictures now belong to the same London gallery.

A critic joked in 1905 that a statue shown among Matisse's canvases was like which sculptor "among the wild beasts"?

Donatello came to mind because one sculpture in the room was in the Renaissance manner; a Paris newspaper printed the quip and it passed into everyday use.

What went unnoticed for 47 days when a New York museum showed Matisse's paper cut-out Le Bateau in 1961?

It was upside down: a visiting stockbroker finally spotted that the little boat and its reflection were the wrong way up, told a guard and then the newspapers.

Who is the sitter in Matisse's Woman with a Hat?

Amélie Matisse, his wife, was painted in a hurry in the weeks before the 1905 salon, with a slash of green across her forehead and another down her nose.

Which US city's modern-art museum owns Matisse's Woman with a Hat, the bequest of a local collector?

San Francisco: the American couple who owned the portrait in Paris brought it back to the Bay Area in 1935, and a local collector, Elise Haas, later bought it and left it to the museum.

In which seaside town did Matisse paint with Signac and Cross in the summer of 1904?

Saint-Tropez was then a fishing village and Paul Signac's home; Matisse painted a dreamlike beach scene in dots of colour, probably based on the view from the house, and Signac bought it.

Which Russian collector commissioned Matisse's Dance and Music for the staircase of his Moscow mansion?

Sergei Shchukin opened his mansion to the public one day a week; after the Revolution the state seized his collection, and the two panels ended up in the Hermitage.

What colour are the five dancers in Matisse's Dance of 1910?

Red: he lifted the ring of dancers from the background of an earlier picture, dropped one of them, and painted the five in a strong red against green and blue.

Which Picasso painting, begun in 1907, was his answer to Matisse's Le bonheur de vivre?

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon was painted behind a locked studio door after Picasso saw Matisse's huge, joyous canvas and set out to go one better.

The title of Matisse's Luxe, Calme et Volupté is a line from a poem by which French writer?

Charles Baudelaire's Invitation to the Voyage, in which a man asks his lover to run away with him to a land of calm and pleasure, supplied the phrase.

Which Matisse painting did art students in Chicago burn in effigy when the Armory Show arrived in 1913?

Blue Nude, painted from memories of a trip to Algeria, had already shocked Paris in 1907; in Chicago the students burned a copy of it, not the canvas itself.

Which New York institution holds Matisse's The Red Studio of 1911?

The Museum of Modern Art bought it in 1949; every picture on the studio's red walls is a real work of his, and in 2022 the museum built a whole exhibition around the painting.

Which tall object stands near the middle of the room in Matisse's The Red Studio?

A grandfather clock stands among the paintings, and its face is one of the few things besides his own artworks that he left free of the red.

Matisse wrote in 1908 that he dreamed of an art as soothing to a tired mind as which piece of furniture?

A good armchair: in Notes of a Painter he wished for an art of balance, purity and serenity, free of troubling subjects, to rest a businessman or a writer after work.

Which American writer's Saturday-evening salon in Paris began with visitors calling to see her Matisse paintings?

Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo bought Woman with a Hat although he called it the nastiest smear of paint he had ever seen; soon strangers were knocking to look at it.

Which Baltimore family's two sisters became major patrons of Matisse and Picasso?

Cone: Claribel and Etta bought his work for decades, and in 1930 he travelled to Baltimore himself; their collection now fills a wing of the city's museum.

Matisse's largest sculptures are four bronze reliefs, made over twenty years, showing which view of a standing woman?

Her back: he returned to the same big relief four times between 1909 and 1930, and each version of The Back is plainer than the last, the final one almost abstract.

Which North African country did Matisse visit in 1912 and again in 1913, painting its gateways, terraces and people?

Morocco: he worked in Tangier, went back within months, and scenes from the two stays kept returning in his paintings for years afterwards.

The grand Nice hotel where Matisse spent his last years had earlier housed which monarch on long winter holidays?

Queen Victoria wintered at the Régina, a palace hotel raised on the hill of Cimiez with her visits in mind; Matisse took a big studio flat there once it had become apartments.

Which American collector commissioned Matisse's mural The Dance II in the early 1930s?

Albert C. Barnes had to wait: Matisse worked from wrong measurements of the wall, found that his finished painting did not fit, and painted the entire mural again.

Which Russian émigrée ran Matisse's studio for his last two decades and sat for many of his late portraits?

Lydia Delectorskaya arrived as a penniless refugee from Siberia, hired for odd jobs around the house; she ended up running the studio and stayed until the day he died.

Which country was Matisse about to sail for in 1940, to escape the Occupation, before he chose to stay in France?

Brazil was the plan, but he wrote to his son that leaving felt like deserting: if everyone of any value left, he asked, what would remain of France?

What illness led to the 1941 operations that left Matisse an invalid for the rest of his life?

Intestinal cancer: he was not expected to live long after the surgery, and he called the thirteen working years that followed his second life.

Monique Bourgeois, the nun who inspired Matisse's chapel at Vence, had earlier been his what?

Nurse: she answered his advertisement after the 1941 operation, later sat for him as a model, and then became Sister Jacques-Marie in a convent that needed a chapel.

For which religious order's sisters did Matisse build the Chapel of the Rosary at Vence?

Dominican sisters were first offered a set of stained-glass windows; he then took on the murals, and ended up designing nearly everything in the building, the priests' robes included.

Which of Matisse's children was arrested and tortured by the Gestapo in 1944 for working with the Resistance?

Marguerite, his daughter and most constant model, survived; her mother, Matisse's estranged wife, was jailed for six months that year for the same cause.

What did Matisse's younger son Pierre do for a living in New York for nearly sixty years?

Ran an art gallery: he opened it in 1931, sold his father's work alongside Miró's and Giacometti's, and kept it going until his death in 1989.

What was the title of Matisse's 1947 artist's book of stencil prints from cut-outs?

Jazz was his publisher's choice of title, which Matisse liked for its hint of improvisation, though most of the plates show clowns, acrobats and other circus acts.

Which London museum owns Matisse's The Snail, a spiral of coloured paper shapes from 1953?

Tate Modern's Snail began with a real one: Matisse said he drew a snail held between two fingers until he saw its shell unfold, and only then began to cut.

Matisse's wall-sized Oceania, the Sky and Oceania, the Sea of 1946 recall a voyage he made in 1930 to which island?

Tahiti: sixteen years after the trip its birds, sharks, jellyfish and seaweed came back to him as white paper shapes, pinned one by one round the walls of a Paris apartment.

After a sweltering outing to Cannes in 1952, the elderly Matisse declared he would make his own what?

Swimming pool: he had gone to watch divers and wilted in the heat, so he cut his own swimmers from blue paper and ran them round the walls of his dining room.

The bedridden Matisse said that his cut-out The Parakeet and the Mermaid had given him a little what to walk in?

Garden: "I have made a little garden all around me where I can walk," he said of its leaves and fruit, adding that in making it he had become the parakeet himself.

Matisse's last commission was a stained-glass rose window for a church beside which American family's estate?

Rockefeller: Nelson Rockefeller ordered the window in memory of his mother, Matisse finished the design just before he died, and Marc Chagall later made the church's other nine.

What did the bedridden Matisse draw his chapel's wall figures with?

A long pole: often confined to his bed or a wheelchair, he drew with a crayon or brush fixed to a long stick, yet the chapel that resulted is counted among the finest work of his career.

On which Mediterranean island did the newly married Matisse work for months in 1898, his first taste of southern light?

Corsica made a lasting mark on the northerner: he worked in Ajaccio, the sun and colour stayed with him, and from then on his painting kept turning back to the south.

On which planet was a crater named after Matisse in 1976?

Mercury's craters are named for artists, writers and composers.

In 1907 a group of admirers set Matisse up at the head of his own what?

Art school: his backers included an American collector and the German painter Hans Purrmann, and he taught there on and off for four years without making a business of it.

Matisse's cut-out The Sheaf was designed as a ceramic wall for a collector couple's courtyard in which American city?

Los Angeles: Frances Brody politely turned down his first design and asked for others, and the tile wall he then made for the couple now belongs to the county's art collection.

Which dealer gave the 34-year-old Matisse his first one-man show in 1904?

Ambroise Vollard's show was a flop; a rougher kind of fame arrived the following year, when Matisse's new pictures caused a scandal at the autumn salon.

On whose advice did Matisse spend his 1898 honeymoon in London, studying the paintings of Turner?

Camille Pissarro's tip was badly timed: Matisse's own teacher died while the couple were away, and the new professor soon pushed the 29-year-old out of the studio.