Henri Matisse came from a family who were of Flemish origin and lived near the Belgian border. At eight o'clock on the evening of December 31, 1869, he was born in his grandparents' home in the town of Le Cateau in the cheerless far north of France. His father was a self-made seed merchant who was a mixture of determination and tightly coiled tension.

Henri had no clear idea of what he wanted to do with his life. He was a twenty-year-old law clerk convalescing from appendicitis when he first began to paint, using a box of colors given to him by his mother. Little more than a year later, in 1890, he had abandoned law and was studying art in Paris. The classes consisted of drawing from plaster casts an...