#19th century french painting

Henri Matisse - Still Life with Books and Candle (1890)

- This painting is one of the first ones which he created.

Two years later in 1891 Matisse returned to Paris to study art at the Académie Julian and became a student of William-Adolphe Bouguereau and Gustave Moreau. He began painting still-lives and landscapes in the traditional Flemish style, at which he achieved reasonable proficiency. Most of his early works employ a dark palette and tend to be gloomy. Matisse was influenced by the works of earlier masters such as Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, Nicolas Poussin, and Antoine Watteau, as well as by modern artists, such as Édouard Manet, and by Japanese art. Chardin was one of Matisse’s most admired painters having made four copies of the French still-life master paintings in the Louvre. Although he executed numerous copies after the old masters he also studied contemporary art.  His first experimentations earned him a reputation as the rebellious member of his studio classes.
After a discouraging year at the Académie Julian, he left in disgust at the overly perfectionist style of teaching there. Afterwards he trained with Moreau, an artist who nurtured more progressive leanings. In both studios, as was usual, students drew endless figure studies from life. From Bouguereau, he learned the fundamental lessons of classical painting. His one art-schooled technical standby, almost a fetish, was the plumb line. No matter how odd the angles in any Matisse, the verticals are usually dead true.
Moreau was a painter who despised the “art du salon”, so Matisse was destined, in a certain sense, to remain an “outcast” of the art world. He initially failed his drawing exam for admission to the École des Beaux-Arts, but persisted and was finally accepted.