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Matisse, the oldest son, whose parents were in the grain business, displayed little interest in art until he was 20 years old. From 1882 to 1887 he attended the secondary school in Saint-Quentin; after a year of legal studies in Paris, he returned to Saint-Quentin and became a clerk in a law office. He began to sit in on an early-morning drawing class at the local École Quentin-Latour, and, in 1890, while recovering from a severe attack of appendicitis, he began to paint, at first copying the coloured reproductions in a box of oils his mother had given him. Soon he was decorating the home of his grandparents at Le Cateau. In 1891 he abandoned the law and returned to Paris to become a professional artist.

In 1898 he married a young woman from Toulouse, Amélie Parayre, and left Paris for a year, visiting London, where he studied the paintings of J.M.W. Turner, and working in Corsica, where he received a lasting impression of Mediterranean sunlight and colour.

The intense colorism of the works he painted between 1900 and 1905 brought him notoriety as one of the Fauves (wild beasts). Many of his finest works were created in the decade or so after 1906, when he developed a rigorous style that emphasized flattened forms and decorative pattern. In 1917, he relocated to a suburb of Nice on the French Riviera, and the more relaxed style of his work during the 1920s gained him critical acclaim as an upholder of the classical tradition in French painting. After 1930, he adopted a bolder simplification of form.

Fauvism as a style began around 1900 and continued beyond 1910. The movement as such lasted only a few years, 1904–1908, and had three exhibitions. The leaders of the movement were Matisse and André Derain. Matisse’s first solo exhibition was at Ambroise Vollard’s gallery in 1904, without much success. His fondness for bright and expressive colour became more pronounced after he spent the summer of 1904 painting in St. Tropez with the neo-Impressionists Signac and Henri-Edmond Cross. In that year, he painted the most important of his works in the neo-Impressionist style, Luxe, Calme et Volupté.

Around April 1906, Matisse met Pablo Picasso, who was 11 years his junior. The two became lifelong friends as well as rivals and are often compared. One key difference between them is that Matisse drew and painted from nature, while Picasso was more inclined to work from imagination. The subjects painted most frequently by both artists were women and still lifes, with Matisse more likely to place his figures in fully realised interiors.

Matisse spent seven months in Morocco from 1912 to 1913, producing about 24 paintings and numerous drawings. His frequent orientalist topics of later paintings, such as odalisques, can be traced to this period.

But middle age, growing affluence, an established international reputation, the disruptions of World War I, and a distaste for public commotion gradually combined to isolate him from the centres of avant-gardism. He began to winter on the French Riviera, and by the early 1920s he was mostly a resident of Nice or its environs. His pictures became less daring in conception and less economical in means. Like many of the painters and composers during these years (notably Pablo Picasso and Igor Stravinsky), Matisse relaxed into a modernized sort of classicism. Such typically Nice-period works as the Odalisque with Magnolias (1923–24) and Decorative Figure on an Ornamental Background (1925–26), however, are masterpieces that deserve their popularity.

During the last years of his life, he was a rather solitary man who was separated from his wife and whose grown-up children were scattered. After 1941, when he underwent an operation for an intestinal tumour, he was bedridden much of the time. He moved to the hilltop of Vence, France in 1943, where he produced his first major cut-out project for his artist’s book titled Jazz. However, these cut-outs were conceived as designs for stencil prints to be looked at in the book, rather than as independent pictorial works. At this point, Matisse still thought of the cut-outs as separate from his principal art form. His new understanding of this medium unfolds with the 1946 introduction for Jazz.

After 1950 he suffered from asthma and heart trouble. Cared for by a faithful Russian woman who had been one of his models in the early 1930s, he lived in a large studio in the Old Hôtel Regina at Cimiez, overlooking Nice. But there are no signs of flagging creative energy or of sadness in his final achievements. On the contrary, these works are among the most daring, most accomplished, and most serenely optimistic of his entire career. In May 1954, his cut out The Sheaf was exhibited at the Salon de Mai and met with success.

Matisse died of a heart attack at the age of 84 on 3 November 1954. He is buried in the cemetery of the Monastère Notre Dame de Cimiez, in the Cimiez neighbourhood of Nice.

The first painting of Matisse acquired by a public collection was Still Life with Geraniums (1910). His The Plum Blossoms (1948) was purchased on 8 September 2005 for the Museum of Modern Art. Estimated price was US$25 million. Previously, it had not been seen by the public since 1970.

In May 2018 at a Christie’s sale of 19th and 20th-century works from the collection of the late Peggy and David Rockefeller, Henri Matisse’s Odalisque couchée aux magnolias (1923) went for $80.8 million, a record for a work by the artist at auction.