Henri Matisse
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.