Henri Matisse
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49 free Henri Matisse trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Henri Matisse was a court clerk until his mother brought him a paint box, and he ended his life in a wheelchair cutting painted paper into a second career. In between he was called a wild beast, bought by the Steins, commissioned by a Moscow textile king, and stayed in Nice through the Occupation while his daughter fought the Gestapo. These 49 questions cover the life and the work: Gustave Moreau's studio, John Russell and the Van Gogh drawing, the Humbert Affair, the Salon d'Automne of 1905 and Woman with a Hat, Dance and Music for Shchukin, The Red Studio and its clock, the Cone sisters, the Académie Matisse, and the rivalry and friendship with Picasso. You will get the cancer surgery that produced the cut-outs, Jazz, the Blue Nudes, Oceania, The Snail at Tate Modern, the nurse who became a nun and the chapel at Vence he called his masterpiece. Easy questions cover Fauvism and collage; the hard tier asks about Carracci, Stravinsky's Nightingale, The Sheaf and the Pinakothek's 1912 purchase. Every answer is cited to a page we checked, with a short explanation so you learn something even when you miss.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Matisse led which movement, named after the French for 'wild beasts'?
Fauvism
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.
Q 02Which creatures appear in at least nine Matisse paintings, among them a famous 1912 canvas now in Moscow?
Goldfish
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.
Q 03Matisse first painted at twenty, with a paint box from his mother, while recovering from what?
Appendicitis
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.
Q 04What had Matisse studied in Paris before he took up painting?
Law
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.
Q 05Matisse described his late way of making pictures from painted paper as "drawing with" what?
Scissors
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.
Q 06Under which Symbolist painter did Matisse study at the École des Beaux-Arts in the 1890s?
Gustave Moreau
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.
Q 07On Belle Île the painter John Russell showed Matisse the work of which then little-known friend?
Van Gogh
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.
Q 08Whose painting Three Bathers did the hard-up young Matisse buy in 1899 and keep for more than thirty years?
Paul Cézanne
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.
Q 09What name do Matisse's many 1920s paintings of costumed models in his Nice studio go by?
Odalisques
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.
Q 10Which painter worked beside Matisse at Collioure in the summer of 1905 and led the new movement with him?
André Derain
André Derain and Matisse painted each other's portraits that summer, and the two pictures now belong to the same London gallery.
Q 11A critic joked in 1905 that a statue shown among Matisse's canvases was like which sculptor "among the wild beasts"?
Donatello
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.
Q 12What went unnoticed for 47 days when a New York museum showed Matisse's paper cut-out Le Bateau in 1961?
It was upside down
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.
Q 13Who is the sitter in Matisse's Woman with a Hat?
Amélie Matisse
Q 21Which New York institution holds Matisse's The Red Studio of 1911?
Museum of Modern Art
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.
Q 22Which tall object stands near the middle of the room in Matisse's The Red Studio?
A grandfather clock
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.
Q 23Matisse wrote in 1908 that he dreamed of an art as soothing to a tired mind as which piece of furniture?
A good armchair
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.
Q 14Which US city's modern-art museum owns Matisse's Woman with a Hat, the bequest of a local collector?
San Francisco
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.
Q 15In which seaside town did Matisse paint with Signac and Cross in the summer of 1904?
Saint-Tropez
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.
Q 16Which Russian collector commissioned Matisse's Dance and Music for the staircase of his Moscow mansion?
Sergei Shchukin
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.
Q 17What colour are the five dancers in Matisse's Dance of 1910?
Red
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.
Q 18Which Picasso painting, begun in 1907, was his answer to Matisse's Le bonheur de vivre?
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
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.
Q 19The title of Matisse's Luxe, Calme et Volupté is a line from a poem by which French writer?
Charles Baudelaire
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.
Q 20Which Matisse painting did art students in Chicago burn in effigy when the Armory Show arrived in 1913?
Blue Nude
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.
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.
Q 24Which American writer's Saturday-evening salon in Paris began with visitors calling to see her Matisse paintings?
Gertrude Stein
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.
Q 25Which Baltimore family's two sisters became major patrons of Matisse and Picasso?
Cone
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.
Q 26Matisse's largest sculptures are four bronze reliefs, made over twenty years, showing which view of a standing woman?
Her back
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.
Q 27Which North African country did Matisse visit in 1912 and again in 1913, painting its gateways, terraces and people?
Morocco
Morocco: he worked in Tangier, went back within months, and scenes from the two stays kept returning in his paintings for years afterwards.
Q 28The grand Nice hotel where Matisse spent his last years had earlier housed which monarch on long winter holidays?
Queen Victoria
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.
Q 29Which American collector commissioned Matisse's mural The Dance II in the early 1930s?
Albert C. Barnes
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.
Q 30Which Russian émigrée ran Matisse's studio for his last two decades and sat for many of his late portraits?
Lydia Delectorskaya
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.