the conservatives of the Academy who were still fighting the battle against Impressionism.
That summer, at Belle-Ile, he met the Australian painter and collector John Russell, who
introduced him to the work of the Impressionists and van Gogh.

In January, 1898, Matisse married Amélie Parayre from Beazelle, near Toulouse.
Acting on Camille Pissarro's advice, the newlyweds honeymooned in London where Henri
studied the paintings of Turner. This was followed by a trip to Corsica and to the south
of France, where he mainly painted landscapes directly from nature and, occasionally,
some interiors such as the Chambre d'Ajaccio. Early in 1899 Matisse returned to Paris,
exhibited for the last time at the Nationale, and finally left l'Ecole des Beaux-Arts, where
Fernand Cormon had replaced Gustave Moreau who had died in 1898. This decisive break
with an officially-recognized career deprived him of the wealthy bourgeois clientele he
could have looked forward to. In the same year Matisse bought from Ambroise Vollard
the Trois baigneuses by Cézanne, which he could ill afford but which he kept until 1936,
despite severe financial problems at the turn of the century. He also bought a drawing by
van Gogh, a bust by Rodin, and exchanged one of his own paintings for Gauguin's
Tahitian Head of a Boy. To finance these purchases, Matisse sold his wife's sapphire
engagement ring.

Leaving school did not end his long apprenticeship. Until 1905 Matisse was still
very much the student, frequenting studios supervised by masters such as Eugène Carrière,
copying masterpieces of the past (his Skate, after Chardin, dates from 1903), seeking
advice from older artists such as Pissarro and Rodin, and attaching himself to them, as was
the case with the Neo-Impressionist Paul Signac. Though the stamp of Matisse's
personality starts appearing in his work some time after 1898, it was not entirely distinct
until 1905, when he was thirty-five years old. His long and laborious apprenticeship is all
the more striking during a period when the avant-garde's rejection of its cultural heritage
was becoming ever more pronounced.

The early years of the new century were dark ones for Matisse, marked by extreme
poverty and illness. In late 1899, in dire financial straits, he took a job with Albert
Marquet painting friezes in the Grand Palais for the 1900 Exposition Universelle, an
experience to which he later frequently referred. The two friends were paid one franc,
twenty-five centimes an hour and worked bent double, with no bench to lean on, painting
garlands one and a half meters high and decorative shields. Madame Matisse, for her part,
opened a milliner's shop. Worn out, Matisse contracted bronchitis in the winter of 1900-
01, and his father (who had provided his son with a modest allowance since 1891) sent him
to recover at Villars-sur-Ollon in the Swiss Alpes Vaudoises. Back in Paris, Matisse
participated for the first time at the Salon des Indépendants. Material difficulties worsened
still and the family was forced to return to Bohain in late 1902.

In 1903, Matisse exhibited two paintings at the Salon d'Automne. In June, 1904,
he had his first private exhibition at Ambroise Vollard's gallery, the catalogue preface to
which was written by critic Roger Marx. Forty-six canvases were shown but the show was
not successful. The summer of 1904 was spent at Saint-Tropez working with Signac and
Cross in a Neo-Impressionist manner. In the spring of 1905, Matisse exhibited Luxe,
calme et volupté at the Salon des Indépendants. This painting, purchased immediately by
Signac and installed in his villa at Saint-Tropez until 1950, is in many ways the
culmination of Matisse's Neo-Impressionist experimentation. At the Salon d'Automne of
that year, Matisse and his circle, nicknamed the "Fauves" or "wild beasts" for their high-
color paintings, created a scandal. The Fauves were never a true movement but rather a
loose association of a dozen or so independent artists who shared an affinity for pure
saturated colors in violent combinations, exceptional freedom of brush work, and willful
distortions and simplifications of form. The Fauve painters grouped around Matisse and

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