Henri Matisse abandons the law in 1891…
1891 CE
In order to prepare himself for the entrance examination at the official École des Beaux-Arts, he enrolls in the privately run Académie Julian, where the master is the strictly academic William-Adolphe Bouguereau, at this time at the peak of a since-departed fame as a painter of bevies of naked, mildly provocative nymphs. (That Matisse should have begun his studies in such a school may seem surprising, and he will later explain the fact by saying that he was acting on the recommendation of a Saint-Quentin painter of hens and poultry yards, but it must be remembered that he himself is for the moment a provincial with tastes that are old-fashioned in a Paris already familiar with the Postimpressionism of Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, and Vincent van Gogh.)
Matisse's earliest canvases are in the seventeenth-century Dutch manner favored by the French Realists of the 1850s.
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