Matisse the master : a life of Henri Matisse, the conquest of colour, 1909-1954 / Hilary Spurling.

It is hard to believe today that Matisse was once almost universally reviled and ridiculed. His response was neither to protest nor to retreat; he simply pushed on from one innovation to the next, and left the world to draw its own conclusions. Unfortunately, these were generally false and often damaging. Throughout his life and afterward people fantasized about his models and circulated baseless fabrications about his private life. Fifty years after his death, this biography shows us the painter as he saw himself. With unprecedented access to new material, Spurling documents a lifetime of desperation and self-doubt. Here for the first time is the truth about Matisse's models; but every woman who played a part in Matisse's life was remarkable in her own right, not least his beloved daughter Marguerite, whose honesty and courage surmounted all ordeals, including interrogation and torture by the Gestapo in the Second World War.--From publisher description.