Henri Matisse (Le Cateau-Cambrésis, France, 1869 – Nice, France, 1954) spent his career testing how far color, line, and decorative pattern could carry pictorial space before it stopped resembling observed reality and became something closer to pure sensation, flat and saturated, without ever losing the human figure entirely.

Equally accomplished as a painter, printmaker, sculptor, and draughtsman, Matisse came to art relatively late, after initially pursuing a career in law. His discovery of Neo-Impressionism and Pointillism pushed him toward increasingly experimental color, and he and André Derain became the central figures of the Fauve movement, so named when the critic Louis Vauxcelles derided the group's raw color with the French word for "wild beasts." Introduced to the young Pablo Picasso by Gertrude Stein in 1906, Matisse entered a decades-long rivalry conducted as much through painting as conversation, each watching the other's exhibitions closely and at times responding directly to the same subject, a dialogue Matisse summarized by saying the two of them were "as different as the north pole is from the south pole," a difference that did as much to define modern painting as either man's individual work.