Henri Matisse (1869–1954), the revolutionary artist of the early twentieth century, is best known for his nudes, portraits, still lifes, interiors, and landscapes, executed in an expressively colorful Fauvist style. Often regarded as one of the most important French painters of the twentieth century, he led the Fauvist movement and pursued the expressive potential of color throughout his career. His vast oeuvre encompasses painting, drawing, sculpture, graphic arts, paper cutouts, and book illustrations.

Matisse was a constant and exceptional draughtsman. Throughout his life, he experimented freely with a diversity of styles, employing innovative composition, light, and brushwork to create his own pictorial language. As early as 1908, in his “Notes of a Painter,” he foresaw his aesthetic path, writing that his art should express “the essential character of things” and embody “balance, purity, and serenity.”

As such, drawing—the most direct expression of the artist’s thoughts—helped Matisse work out ideas as well as compositional and stylistic problems. During his lifetime, he created several distinctive series of drawings, such as Thèmes et Variations, pen-and-ink works exploring the relationship between artist and model, followed by a series of bolder contour-line drawings in his later career.

Trained in Paris under the Symbolist painter Gustave Moreau, who encouraged his students to develop individual artistic voices, Matisse emerged at the turn of the century as a central figure of the Parisian avant-garde. His mature work is distinguished by radiant color and flattened space that reflects the light and atmosphere of the Mediterranean, where he spent much of his later life.