Henri Matisse (1869–1954) came late to painting. He was a lawyer's clerk in northern France when, about twenty and in bed after appendicitis, his mother gave him a box of paints. He said later that he felt "transported into a sort of paradise".
In 1905 he and his friends showed paintings in colours so violent that a critic called them fauves, wild beasts. American collectors living a few streets from here, the Steins, bought his work when almost nobody else would. He opened a school in 1908, then lived mostly in Nice for the light.
In 1941, aged 71, a cancer operation left him often in bed. He asked the surgeon for three or four years; he got thirteen, and spent them cutting painted paper with scissors: the cut-outs, a new art. He called it "drawing with scissors".
