The French artist Henri Matisse changed the course of modern art with his bold colors and expressive forms. Along with Picasso, he was one of the most influential artists of the 20th century.
Matisse’s paintings defied tradition. He embraced vivid hues and fluid shapes that redefined how art could look and feel.
As a young artist, he studied under the Symbolist painter Odilon Redon. But he was deeply influenced by the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists. He experimented with the pointillist techniques of Georges Seurat and Paul Signac.
Over time, though, he moved away from tiny dashes and dots. He shifted toward bold planes of color that broke free from realism, pushing the bounds of abstraction.
Matisse’s use of color became expressive rather than representational. This led to the founding of the Fauvist movement, which he led with André Derain.
In his later years, when illness limited his ability to paint, Matisse turned to cut paper as a new form of expression. Using scissors like a brush, he created vibrant, flowing compositions from hand-painted paper, pioneering what he called “painting with scissors.”
This guide explores ten of his most famous paintings, each showing his creativity and innovation. I tell you where to find them and describe what makes them so compelling.
Famous Matisse Paintings
1. The Joy of Life (1905–1906)
📍 Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia
🔹A vibrant, dreamlike scene of nude figures dancing and lounging in nature, considered a key work of Fauvism.
Probably Matisse’s most famous painting, The Joy of Life is one of the highlights of the Barnes Foundation. This bold, radiant masterpiece holds a central spot in a small second floor gallery, where its colors and energy come to life.
That wasn’t always the case. For years, it sat in a dimly lit stairway landing, a placement Albert Barnes believed enhanced its sense of motion.
Matisse’s The Joy of Life is his most famous Fauvist work. The painting bursts with pure, expressive color, filling the scene with a vivid forest, a golden meadow, and a shimmering sea. Scattered throughout are nude figures, lounging, dancing, and moving freely.
The mood is wildly sensuous and full of life. The way Matisse played with perspective and scale was radical at the time, drawing the viewer into the scene.
The painting was first owned by Gertrude Stein, who later sold it to Barnes. She recognized its impact, saying, “Matisse had painted Le Bonheur de Vivre and had created a new formula for color that would leave its mark on every painter of the period.”
Today, the painting is a cornerstone of modern art, celebrated for its energy, movement, and groundbreaking use of color.
>>> Click here to book a Barnes Foundation ticket
2. Woman with a Hat
📍 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
🔹A portrait of Matisse’s wife, Amélie, with bold, unconventional colors, which shocked audiences at the 1905 Salon d’Automne.
First exhibited at the 1905 Salon d’Automne in Paris, this painting helped spark one of the biggest controversies in modern art. It was at the center of the debate that led to the birth of Fauvism, the first major art movement of the 20th century.
The term “fauve, “French for “wild beast,” was coined by a critic to describe the artists whose bold, brightly colored canvases filled the central gallery of the Grand Palais.
Femme au Chapeau marked a major shift in Matisse’s style. He moved away from the controlled brushstrokes of his earlier work, embracing a more expressive, free-flowing approach.
The loose, sketchy brushwork and non-naturalistic colors shocked audiences at the time, making the painting seem unfinished or even chaotic.
The subject of the portrait is Matisse’s wife, Amélie. She’s elegantly dressed in bourgeois fashion with a gloved hand holding a fan and a flamboyant hat perched on her head. But while her pose is traditional, the colors are anything but.
3. The Red Studio
📍 MoMA, New York City
🔹A masterpiece of flattened space and vivid red hues, blurring the boundaries between interior and decoration.
Painted in Issy-les-Moulineaux, just outside Paris, The Red Studio offers a miniature retrospective of Matisse’s work. The painter fills his studio with paintings, sculptures, and ceramics, scattered across the space as if inviting the viewer into his creative world.
One of his most recognizable works, Young Sailor II, appears in the top right. It hangs just above a handless grandfather clock, a possible nod to the timelessness of artistic creation.
While the objects in the room are fully formed, the furniture is drawn in ghostly outlines, giving the space a dreamlike quality.
Matisse later admitted he didn’t know why he chose red for the composition. But it dominates the scene, flattening depth and focusing attention on form and structure.
>>> Click here to pre-book a MoMA ticket
4. Dance II (1910)
📍 Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia
🔹A dynamic, rhythmic depiction of five figures dancing in a circle, embodying energy, movement, and Fauvist simplicity.
The Dance II is one of Matisse’s largest and most ambitious works. The 45-foot-wide mural was designed specifically for the arched vaulted windows of Barnes’ Merion building, making it an integral part of the space.
Another version of The Dance, also created for Barnes, is now displayed at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris.
This piece marked a turning point in Matisse’s career, an early experiment with cut paper as a medium. Using bold shapes in gray, pink, blue, and black, he created a simplified yet fluid composition of tumbling figures.
Like many of his later cut-outs, it radiates joy and movement. The design reflects the playful, decorative style that would define much of Matisse’s work in the 1940s.
5. La Blouse Romaine
📍 Pompidou Center, Paris
🔹 A richly colored Fauvist portrait where the figure fades into bold color blocks, while an embroidered blouse takes center stage.
This Fauvist portrait at the Pompidou is a perfect example of Matisse’s signature style. The colors are rich, the lines are fluid, and the composition feels decorative and abstract. But the real focus isn’t the woman. It’s her embroidered blouse.
The figure is simplified into bold color blocks, allowing the blouse to take center stage. Its flowing fabric is filled with intricate patterns, creating a sense of movement and energy. The blouse seems to expand beyond the woman herself, almost swallowing her form, turning fabric into art.
This painting reflects Matisse’s lifelong fascination with textiles and pattern. He often drew inspiration from traditional garments, particularly from Eastern Europe and North Africa, incorporating their bold designs into his work.
Here, he transforms the blouse into something more than clothing. It becomes a celebration of pure color, rhythm, and form, anticipating the stripped-down, vibrant compositions of his later cut-outs.
>>> Click here to pre-book a Pompidou ticket
6. The Blue Nude II (1952)
📍 MoMA, New York City
🔹 A bold, fluid composition of a reclining female figure, which distills form and movement into pure color.
Blue Nude II is one of Henri Matisse’s most famous cut-outs and a defining work of his late career. Created using his “painting with scissors” technique, it’s part of a series of four Blue Nudes, but this version stands out as the most recognized.
The artwork depicts a seated female figure, reduced to a series of fluid, interlocking shapes cut from deep blue paper. Matisse carefully arranged these pieces to create a sense of movement and balance, despite the figure’s simplified form.
The pose echoes the classical reclining nudes seen in Renaissance and Neoclassical art. Yet Matisse transforms it into something entirely modern and abstract.
At this stage in his life, Matisse was confined to a wheelchair and could no longer paint with ease. Instead, he developed a technique where he cut painted sheets of paper and arranged them into compositions, effectively “sculpting” with color.
7. The Green Stripe (Portrait of Madame Matisse)
📍 Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen
🔹A bold portrait of Matisse’s wife, where a sharp green stripe down her face divides warm and cool tones, challenging traditional portraiture.
The Green Stripe is an iconic Fauvist painting. It has the genre’s typical intensity and use of wild, unrestrained color.
It’s a portrait of Matisse’s wife. A bold green stripe divides her face, transforming her features into an abstract composition where color takes precedence over form.
The background and figure blend into a vivid, puzzle-like arrangement, pushing the boundaries of traditional portraiture.
8. Open Window, Collioure
📍 National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
🔹A vivid, light-filled view of a Mediterranean harbor, marking Matisse’s transition into Fauvism with expressive color and loose brushwork.
Open Window, Collioure is one of Matisse’s most famous early works and a defining piece of Fauvism. Painted in 1905, it captures the view from his window in the small seaside town of Collioure in southern France.
The scene is bursting with color. Pink, blue, green, and orange fill the canvas in bold, unexpected ways.
Instead of realistic shading or perspective, Matisse uses pure color to create light and depth. The boats in the harbor, framed by the open shutters, seem to float in a dreamlike space.
This painting was a turning point for Matisse. It marked his move away from traditional techniques toward something freer and more expressive.
The wild, unblended brushstrokes and bright, unnatural colors shocked audiences at the time. But they also helped launch Fauvism.
9. The Piano Lesson
📍 The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York
🔹A geometric, almost Cubist-like scene of a young boy at a piano, symbolizing discipline, learning, and Matisse’s evolving style.
This large, flat, and gray painting depicts Matisse’s living room. His son, Pierre, sits at the piano. His music teacher hovers, cool and distant, above him.
Matisse’s son was actually fighting in WWI. So, this is a bit of a nostalgic painting. The artist painted his son much younger than he actually was.
It’s a highly abstract painting for Matisse. Everything is stripped bare. And it shows his preoccupation with Cubism, a dominant field at the time.
What is the triangle of green, for example? It most likely represents a ray of light coming into the room.
A metronome swings between the music teacher (a Matisse painting) and a Matisse sculpture in the bottom left.
10. The Snail
📍 Tate Modern, London
🔹One of his final cut-out works, this abstract spiral of colorful paper shapes represents Matisse’s shift from painting to collage.
By 1948, Matisse was no longer painting and was confined to bed. There, he made works called gouaches decoupees.
The shapes were placed and pasted on the canvas by an assistance, following Matisse’s instructions.
The Snail, one of the latest of this type, is extremely large. The idea came from the artist’s many drawings of snails.
The cut-out uses pairs of complementary colors (red/green, orange/blue, and yellow/mauve. The snail is represented by a spiral of colors, cut in a variety of sizes.
I hope you’ve enjoyed my guide to the most famous paintings of Henri Matisse. You may enjoy these other art guides:
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