Henri Matisse was a classically trained artist who brought a thoroughly modern eye to his traditional foundations. The result was a daring new style, with flat planes of unbridled color and a bold use of line, which challenged his contemporaries to push the boundaries of modern art and helped Matisse become one of the defining artists of the 20th century. Over the course of his career, his style underwent several transformations, but his consistent pairing of simple, familiar subject matter—portraits, still lifes, nudes, and intimate domestic scenes—with innovative colors, lines, and forms ensures that Matisse’s works continue to captivate audiences to this day. Henri Matisse (French, 1869–1954) was born into a family of weavers and was trained as a lawyer before turning to art in his twenties. His youthful exposure to textiles helped shape his love of color and texture. Although his early artwork paid homage to influences such as Paul Cezanné and Edward Manet, Matisse was a modernist through and through and spent most of his career experimenting with diverse media, techniques, and styles. He was a draftsman, printmaker, and sculptor but is best known as a painter. Some of his most acclaimed paintings were created in the early 1900s, when he found his place at the leading edge of the Fauvism movement. Matisse is now widely considered to be the supreme colorist of the 20th century.