Synopsis
Book by Spurling Hilary
Extrait
Henri Matisse often compared his development as a painter to the growth of a seed.
"It's like a plant that takes off once it is firmly rooted," he said, looking back at the end of his life: "the root presupposes everything else." He himself was rooted in northeastern France, on the edge of the great Flanders plain where his ancestors had lived for centuries before the convulsive social and industrial upheavals of the nineteenth century slowly prised them loose. His father's family were weavers. Henri Emile Benoît Matisse was born in a tiny, tumbledown weaver's cottage on the rue du Chêne Arnaud in the textile town of Le Cateau-Cambrésis at eight o'clock in the evening on the last night of the year, 31 December 1869. The house had two rooms, a beaten earth floor and a leaky roof. Matisse said long afterwards that rain fell through a hole above the bed in which he was born.
His parents, who worked in Paris, were paying a New Year visit to their hometown. They called their first child Henri after his father, following a family tradition that went back four generations. The first Henri Matisse had been a linen-weaver in the nearby village of Montay in 1789, when the French Revolution abruptly halved demand from the court for the fine linens of Cambrésis. This ancestor, Henri Joseph Matisse, married a tanner's daughter from Le Cateau and moved with his loom to the tanners' quarter outside the mediaeval town walls, settling round about 1800 on the place du Rejet at the top of the rue du Chêne Arnaud: a patch of low-lying wasteland heavily flooded each year when the winter rains washed liquid mud down from the high ground on one side to meet water rising up through the tanneries lining the banks of the river Selle on the other. Hardship and adversity bred strong wills and stubborn resistance in the Matisse family. Henri Joseph's son, Jean Baptiste Henri, abandoned the humble weaver's trade to become a factory foreman in one of the mechanised woollen mills beginning to spring up in the town in the 1850s. His son in turn would leave home and abandon textiles altogether.
This was Emile Hippolyte Henri Matisse, the painter's father, who found work in his twenties as a shop-boy in Paris. By January 1869, when he married Anna Héloïse Gérard, the daughter of another Cateau tanner, he had been promoted to trainee buyer in ladies' underwear. He worked for the Cour Batave on the brand-new boulevard Sébastopol, a highly fashionable store in a custom-built modern shopping complex specialising in lingerie, trousseaux, ladies' stockings, bodices, blouses, personal and household linen. This sort of job was a natural progression for the clever, ambitious son and grandson of weavers in a region that supplied the capital's apparently insatiable demand for novelties and fancy goods in the 1860s. Hippolyte Henri would take pride all his life in his thorough grounding at the Cour Batave, which served him well on regular buying trips to Paris long after he had moved back to set up his own business nearer home. It sharpened his eye for quality, confirmed his distaste for slack or shoddy performance, laid down the exacting standards by which he judged himself, his world, and especially his eldest son ever afterwards.
Anna Gérard, who had also gone up to Paris to work in a hat-shop, was twenty-four when she married Hippolyte Henri Matisse, who was four years older. Warmhearted, outgoing, capable and energetic, she was small and sturdily built with the fashionable figure of the period: full breasts and hips, narrow waist, neat ankles and elegant small feet. She had fair skin, broad cheekbones and a wide smile. "My mother had a face with generous features, the highly distinctive traits of French Flanders," said her son Henri, who spoke always with particular tenderness of the sensitivity and the innate generosity reflected in his mother's character as in her looks. Throughout the forty years of her marriage, she provided unwavering, rocklike support to her husband and her sons.
Hippolyte Henri's own parents had both died by the time he was twenty-five, leaving him with no immediate family except an elder sister married to a local weaver and a younger one working, like her sister-in-law, as a hat-maker in Paris. Anna herself belonged to a large and cohesive family of Gérards, established for three hundred years in and around the rue du Chêne Arnaud as tanners, furriers, glove-makers, leather-dressers and skin-merchants. Anna's father, Benoît Elie Gérard, dealt in hides from the family tannery as well as running a small farm on the rue des Arbalétriers where she was born in 1844, the fourth of his eight children. Her younger brother Emile--the first boy born after four older sisters--would mechanise and modernise the tanning works. The go-ahead Emile stood godfather to Anna's son Henri, who grew up surrounded by a watchful, protective network of aunts and uncles, first, second and third cousins, as well as more distant connections related by blood or marriage, all originally based in Le Cateau but spilling out increasingly in his own and his parents' generation into the surrounding countryside, several taking the train the hundred miles south to Paris to find jobs on a temporary or permanent basis.
One of Anna's elder sisters had married a railwayman, François Mahieux, who switched to innkeeping and ended up running a hotel eighteen miles away at Bohain-en-Vermandois, where Hippolyte Henri's second cousin, Edouard Lancelle, ran a medical practice and doubled as the mayor's secretary. Cousin Lancelle lived with his family on the rue Peu d'Aise. The Mahieux ran the Golden Lion Hotel two streets away on the rue St-Antoine. Henri Matisse was eight days old when his parents moved with him to Bohain to take over a general store on the corner of the rue Peu d'Aise and the main street, called rue du Château. The shop sold everything from seeds to groceries, hardware and housepaints, although over the next few years most of the sidelines would be swallowed up by the seed-merchant's side of the business.
The Matisse-Gérard partnership prospered (as did the Mahieux-Gérards at the Golden Lion) on the strength of Hippolyte Henri's business flair, his own and his wife's contacts, their joint commitment to strenuous, unremitting effort, backed up by her small dowry and his modest inheritance. On his father's death in 1865, Hippolyte Henri had inherited a one-third share in the tiny Matisse estate, consisting chiefly of the property on the rue du Chêne Arnaud, which passed, before or just after his marriage, from his family to Anna's. Her retired parents were living there by New Year's Eve, 1869, when their grandson Henri was born. Anna's father died there in his sixty-first year three months later, on 27 March, and on 29 March, as the family gathered for the funeral, a second baby was born in the same cramped cottage.
This was Emile's first child, another Emile Gérard, cousin and almost exact contemporary of Henri Matisse. The two young fathers, starting out simultaneously on what proved to be highly successful parallel careers, stood godfather to one another's sons. The two boys grew up in a world that placed a high premium on enterprise, initiative, risk-taking, a willingness to experiment and to keep an open mind. Each was groomed to succeed his father at the head of a rapidly expanding business. Over the next twenty years the Bohain hardware store under Hippolyte Henri Matisse grew into a streamlined wholesale and retail operation with a fleet of delivery wagons supplying seed, fertiliser and fodder to beet-growers and transporters all over the surrounding plain. Emile Gérard meanwhile made a fortune by installing a tallow works alongside the tannery on the river Selle, shortly afterwards building a second factory to manufacture the French food industry's latest product, an imperial invention called margarine.
The two brothers-in-law belonged to a breed of dynamic young businessmen who were turning away from the rural past all over France to build a brave new urban world. But the changes they dreamed of with such prodigious confidence were literally devastating. Henri Matisse was born just as the accelerating juggernaut of industrialisation and deforestation reached top speed in his native region. When his family settled on the rue du Château, Bohain was already halfway through its transformation from a sleepy weavers' village deep in the ancient forest of the Arrouaise to a modern manufacturing centre with ten thousand clanking looms installed in the town itself and the villages round about. The population, which had taken forty years to grow from two to four thousand before the large-scale installation of steam machinery in the 1860s, would very nearly double again in the twenty years before Matisse finally left home for Paris.
The town's principal product was textiles but sugar-beet output also doubled in the first ten years of his life. Energetic clearance meant that the last pockets of surrounding woodland were cut down to make way for beet plants in 1869, the year of Matisse's birth. The windmills and belfries that traditionally dotted the rolling flatlands of the Vermandois were far outnumbered in his childhood by the smoking chimneys of sugar refineries and textile mills. The streams on these chalky downs--Bohain stood high in the centre of a triangle marking the sources of the Somme, the Selle and the Escaut--ran with dye and chemical refuse on leaving the towns. The streets of Bohain were slippery with beet pulp in autumn, and the air was rank all winter with the stench of rotting and fermenting beets. Visitors from the outside world in the 187...
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