Henri Matisse begins to sit in on…

Henri Matisse begins 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, the twenty-year-old Matisse begins to paint, at first copying the colored reproductions in a box of oils his mother had given him.

Soon he is decorating the home of his grandparents at Le Cateau.

Matisse, whose parents are in the grain business, had attended the secondary school in Saint-Quentin from 1882 to 1887; after a year of legal studies in Paris, he returned to Saint-Quentin and became a clerk in a law office.