Two Rivals Under One Roof: Picasso and Matisse

In the early 1900s, a dealer named Ambroise Vollard ran a gallery in Paris that would become an unlikely crossroads of the century's coming revolution. It was here, among works by Cézanne and Van Gogh, that a young, still largely unknown painter named Pablo Picasso and a more established but controversial Frenchman named Henri Matisse found their paths converging, if only through proximity on the same walls.

Matisse's own road to that gallery had been long and unlikely. Born on the last day of 1869 in Le Cateau-Cambrésis, the eldest son of a prosperous grain merchant, he had trained for the law, not for painting. He worked as a court administrator after qualifying, a dutiful son following a sensible path — until an attack of appendicitis left him bedridden, and his mother brought him art supplies to pass the time. He later called what he discovered there 'a kind of paradise.' His father was deeply disappointed; Matisse never turned back.

He returned to Paris in 1891 to study seriously, first under William-Adolphe Bouguereau at the Académie Julian, then under Gustave Moreau. He copied the old masters — Chardin above all — in the Louvre, and absorbed the influence of Manet and Japanese art. But it was a chance encounter in 1896 with the Australian painter John Russell, on the island of Belle Île, that changed everything: Russell introduced him to Impressionism and to Van Gogh's work, even giving him a Van Gogh drawing. Matisse abandoned his earth-toned palette for brilliant colour almost overnight.

The years that followed brought hardship as much as discovery. In 1902, his wife Amélie's family became entangled in the Humbert Affair, a major financial scandal that left Matisse the sole breadwinner for seven people. He painted in a more sombre, saleable style to survive, and made his first serious attempt at sculpture, completing The Slave in 1903. It was around this same period, at Vollard's gallery, that his 1904 solo exhibition took place — without much success, but placing him among a circle of artists the dealer championed early, a circle that Turkish accounts of the era note also included Picasso.

By 1905, Matisse's colour had grown fearless. Working with André Derain in the fishing village of Collioure, he produced paintings of such raw, unmixed colour that when shown at the Salon d'Automne alongside Derain, Vlaminck, and Marquet, critic Louis Vauxcelles dubbed the group 'Fauves' — wild beasts. Matisse's Woman with a Hat bore the brunt of public outrage, yet it was bought by the Stein family, early champions of the new avant-garde art taking shape in Paris.