Henri Matisse

📍Le Cateau-Cambrésis, 59360 Nord, France

“I was born Henri-Émile-Benoît Matisse on the 31st of December 1869 in Le Cateau-Cambrésis, a textile town in northern France. My father was a grain merchant and my mother painted ceramics for pleasure — it was her art materials that I used when I was ill at twenty and began painting to pass the time. I had been training as a lawyer. The illness gave me painting, and painting gave me everything. I went to Paris and worked with Gustave Moreau and eventually with colour in a way that had never been done. The Fauvists, the Nice years, the chapel at Vence built from a wheelchair — these were the arc. Le Cateau-Cambrésis gave me the textile patterns and the northern light; the south gave me the colour.”

Sources: Spurling, H. The Unknown Matisse (1998) and Matisse the Master (2005), Knopf; Matisse, H. Jazz (1947), Tériade