Henri Matisse belonged to the great, heroic age of the School of Paris, a period which now seems of almost mythic stature, and he is one of its greatest figures. Many people bracket him with Picasso, often with the qualification that while Picasso may have been the more inventive genius of the two, Matisse was probably the greater and more finished painter.
He has become almost synonymous with the sheer flair and brilliance of French art at its best, a true Mediterranean classic and classicist who created a sunlit world of gracious women in interiors, flowers, enticing nudes draped over sofas, and the inimitable light of the south - in short, a radiant vision of joie de vivre.
The reality of Matisse's life, however, does not correspond to the art or to the stereotype. In the first place, he was not a southerner at all, he was born in northern France in a small, ugly town (Le Cateau) only a few miles from the Flemish border. Life there was dour, charmless and tough and his father was a local businessman who had been modestly successful in Paris through sheer hard work before returning to his native region.
Matisse was born in 1869 and so was too young to remember the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, but it left bitter memories locally and for years afterwards people pointed out the spot where some townsman had been shot by Prussians, or where a 10-year-old boy fired his father's fusil at them. The great battle of St Quentin was fought close by and in the retreat which followed, the disordered French and the pursuing Germans poured through the streets of the town, while the inhabitants barricaded themselves into their houses.
Defeat - a total, humiliating defeat, followed by an interlude of military occupation - bit deep into the national psyche, and Matisse grew up with this recent legacy of failure and demoralisation. For many years, it seems, he would not even talk of it. (His great contemporary and fellow-student, Rouault, was actually born during the short-lived Paris Commune while German shells fell in the city.) So Matisse was really a northerner, like his great influence van Gogh, whose birthplace had actually been only a few miles across the border. Like him, too, he was in quest of Mediterranean light and colour, and in that he typified an entire generation. Fauvism, the movement with which he was identified in his earlier days as a painter, was essentially created by men from the industrial areas of France or, like Derain, from the big smoky cities. ("Fauves", the name applied to them originally by hostile critics, means something like "wild beasts".)
The impact made on them by the Mediterranean region, its cobalt-blue skies, vivid sea and red earth pulsating with fertility, was a potent factor in triggering the colour revolutions of the early 20th century. A new book which takes Matisse's life up to 1908, lifts the lid off some dark areas of his life. The author, Hilary Spurling, is neither an art historian nor an expert on things French; she is an English journalist and biographer who won the Duff Cooper Prize for her life of the novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett. But she has dug deep, and her very readable book shows that Matisse's generally sunlit art emerged from an often shadowed early life. His marriage, to the beautiful and spirited Toulousain Amelie Parayre, was a happy and well-matched one, but once Matisse had embarked on his own road as a painter, after his art studies in Paris, he needed all his wife's loyalty to keep afloat. They went through tough years of poverty together, interspersed with humiliating appeals for help to Matisse's father - who soon became convinced that his son had no real talent. Matisse already had a daughter, Marguerite, from an early liaison during his student days, and from her early teens she turned out to be one of his greatest supports. Probably Matisse was not by nature a revolutionary, he was at heart (or so I have always suspected, at least) a traditionalist. But the suffocating academic styles of the late 19th century offered nothing to a man with something of his own to say, and he was acutely aware that the successful French artists of his day were an end and not a beginning. The 20th century demanded something entirely new, and a break with the immediate past.
Bougereau, one of the most famous and successful of these pompiers, even told the young Matisse that he would never learn to draw properly - which seems particularly ironic nowadays, when he is considered a supreme draughtsman. However, this reaction was typical of the climate of opinion at the turn of the century, so Matisse found it agonisingly hard to sell his work and often lived from hand to mouth.
Impressionists such as Monet and Renoir offered by their example some way out or forward, and for a time Matisse came under the influence - dominance even - of Signac, the acknowledged leader of the Pointillistes who painted mainly in dots. Signac, with his yacht on which he sailed his friends around the south of France, and his enthusiasm and organising talents, was a rallying point for the avant garde, but even he found it hard to accept Matisse's gradual move into Fauvism and pure colour laid down in parallel brushstrokes. Hilary Spurling has unearthed a major scandal from early in the century, in which Matisse's parents-in-law, the Parayres, were heavily but innocently involved. They had been drawn into the orbit of a couple, Therese and Frederic Humbert, who gave themselves out to be financiers and investors, but in fact were swindlers on a monumental scale. The case made headlines in the French national (and local) press for months, and the trial of the Humberts in Paris was a malodorous affair which ended in them each being sentenced to five years' solitary confinement with hard labour.
The Parayres were called as witnesses, but cross-questioning established that they had been innocent dupes - mere respectable "cover" for a pair of criminal swindlers. Yet the publicity was unrelenting and damaging, so Matisse took over, dealt capably with the press and with various intruders and busybodies, and showed himself both a dutiful son-in-law and a cool-headed man in an emergency.
The whole affair, however, was a terrible strain which in Hilary Spurling's opinion hardened the reserve and outward crust of his character. Later in life, many people - including Picasso - were to find him bourgeois, stiff and over-correct; but most of it was plainly a self-protective pose he had learned the hard way.
However, after all the years of poverty, lack of sales and penny-pinching (mostly in the south, where living was cheaper), the tide began to turn. Important patrons began to appear, notably the Steins who were over from America to look at new art - incidentally, Hilary Spurling reinforces my own (and many other people's) view of that over-promoted and scheming woman, Gertrude Stein.
The real brains and taste of the family was supplied by Sarah, the wife of Michael Stein, and it was she who was largely responsible for the inspired buying which helped Matisse, Picasso and other hard-up artists at a crucial time in their careers. But Gertrude, typically, managed later to avert most of the credit onto herself. The early battles for Fauvism helped to put Matisse on the map and as the book ends, we find him edging slowly into the position of a Modernist master. His greatest and most creative years, however, were still to come, since he was by nature a very slow developer - an odd mixture of daring and extreme caution - and the great innovative colourist had to shed many skins before he fully evolved his own mature, recognisable style.
But great masterpieces like La Danse, painted for a Russian patron, are already just around the corner, and the gloomy north, with its struggles and family shadows, is steadily receding before the torrid light of the south.
The Unknown Matisse: A Life of Henri Matisse, Volume one 1869-1908 By Hilary Spurling is published by Hamish Hamilton, price £25 in UK.