His drastic change of profession deeply disappointed his father. 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. I threw myself into it like a beast that plunges towards the thing it loves.” 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. He said later, “From the moment I held the box of colors in my hands, I knew this was my life. Following an attack of appendicitis, he began to paint in 1889, when his mother had brought him art supplies during the period of convalescence. Matisse’s discovery of his true profession came about in an unusual manner. Once Matisse finished school, his father, a much more practical man, arranged for his son to obtain a clerking position at a law office. Although he considered law as tedious, he nonetheless passed the bar in 1888 with distinction and began his practice begrudgingly. In 1887 he went to Paris to study law, working as a court administrator in Le Cateau-Cambrésis after gaining his qualification. When Matisse in turn had children of his own to bring up, he chided himself for any lapse in discipline or open display of tenderness as weakness on his part. In later years when survival itself depended on habits of thrift and self-denial, the artist prided himself on being a man of the North. "Be quick!" "Look out!" "Run along!" "Get cracking!" were the refrains that rang in his ears as a boy. Matisse's childhood memories were of a stern upbringing. The fancy pigeons he kept in Nice more than half a century after he left home recalled the weavers' pigeon-lofts tucked away behind even the humblest house in Bohain. In later life he never lost his feeling for his native soil, for seeds and growing things he had encountered in his youth. He was a pensive child and by his own account he was a dreamy, frail and not outstandingly bright. The young Matisse was an awkward youth who seemed ill-adapted to the rigors of the North in particular, he hated the gelid winters. 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.
The colors evidently left a lasting impression on Henri. She ran the section of her husband's shop that sold housepaints, making up the customers' orders and advising on color schemes.
Quentin for lycée.Īnna Heloise worked hard. Matisse later said: "My mother loved everything I did." He grew up in nearby Bohain-en-Vermandois, an industrial textile center, until the age of ten, when his father sent him to St. Throughout the forty years of her marriage, she provided unwavering, rocklike support to her husband and her sons. "My mother had a face with generous features," said her son Henri, who always spoke of her with particular tenderness of the sensitivity. She had fair skin, broad cheekbones and a wide smile.
#HANGING BY A MOMENT SONGSTER FULL#
Warmhearted, outgoing, capable and energetic, she was small and sturdily built with the fashionable figure of the period: full breasts and hips, narrow waist, neat ankles and elegant small feet. His mother, Anna Heloise Gerard, was a daughter of a long line of well-to-do tanners. Matisse’s father, Émile Hippolyte Matisse, was a grain merchant whose family were weavers. The coming of the railway had put Bohain on the industrial map, but people still traveled everywhere on foot or horseback. Matisse grew up in a world that was still detaching itself from a way of life in some ways unchanged since Roman times. Matisse’s ancestors had lived in the area for centuries before the convulsive social and industrial upheavals of the nineteenth century. Matisse said long afterwards that rain fell through a hole above the bed in which he was born. The house had two rooms, a beaten earth floor and a leaky roof. Henri Emile Benoît Matisse was born in a tiny, tumbledown weaver's cottage on the rue du Chêne Arnaud in the textile town of Le Cateau-Cambrésis at eight o'clock in the evening on the last night of the year, 31 December 1869 (Le Cateau-Cambrésis is in the extreme north of France near the Belgian border). This lithograph is one of a rare edition made during the Second World War (1941 - 1943) by the Fabiani Editions.
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