Okay boys and girls. Put down your pads and pencils. This is a quiz! Who painted the painting below? It is 38×46.” And it is by a famous artist.

When I stumbled upon this painting I was immediately struct by the variety of color in the painting, particularly in the sky and water. There are a variety of blues and violets and on the warm side there are reds, oranges, and yellows. They are all nicely balanced and, mind you, these colors aren’t obvious. On the other hand, the painting looks rough even awkward, especially the treatment of the foreground. Nevertheless, this painter, I thought, is doing things that suggest that he or she is no slouch. Any ideas? Here are some hints.

• Well, this painter said that what he did was simply respond to “sensations” and that the subject was merely “a prompt.”
• He emphasized “sincerity” and scoffed at artists searching for “success” saying that, “If [a painter] is concerned with success, he works with just the one idea; pleasing people and selling. He loses the support of his own conscience and is dependent on how others are feeling. He neglects his gifts and eventually loses them.”
• He is not a big fan of explanations of pictures, saying, “Listen: do you want to paint? Well, start by having your tongue cut out because from now on you should express yourselves only with the brush!”
• He was a big fan of independence saying, “If you work for others, you never get anywhere.”
• He was down on students thinking “technique” held answers and he believed that painting for competition was “farcical.”
• He wasn’t big on marketing either saying that “To make a sale, you invent lies that have somehow vanished into thin air by the time the deal is done.” He loath much of contemporary art (of his day) saying that the problem with it was that the artists didn’t have “to feel.” In the end, he said, “…you have to surrender to nature and take what comes; you take it whole….You have to let yourself be….you have to put some faith in your own gifts and surrender yourself to the promptings of nature, to nature’s inspiration.”
• When he was 47, this artist was concerned with the more delicate nuances of light and atmosphere and so he made a visit to Giverny to visit Monet. A friend of our mystery artist said he “swears only by Claude Monet.”

The painter with these strong beliefs, the painter who did the painting above when he was 29 is Henri Matisse. I think Matisse’s beliefs and approach to painting is particularly interesting, given the fact that he eventually found his own way and moved on to do remarkably different pictures. But his training, the emphasis on surrendering to nature and on feelings, his disdain for technique and marketing or a success-driven approach and his embrace of independence and thinking of the subject matter merely as a prompt – all these things combined to give Matisse the strength to find himself. These things were not incidental to whom he became; they were foundational.