At first blush, it seems Henri Emile Benoit Matisse was the perfect bourgeois son: intelligent, well educated and a trained lawyer. Working in a provincial notary's office as a clerk in 1890, Matisse was all set for a stable and financially rewarding legal career. But he was bored stiff by law (“it was Hebrew to me”), and only persisted out of pragmatism and loyalty, and for want of anything else to do. He spent his days copying dry legal documents, and when boredom set in he entertained himself by shooting passers-by with putty pellets from a glass peashooter.

This juvenile dissent would be an unremarkable fact in the history of law if it weren't for what followed. Not long into his appointment, the young man was struck with a severe hernia (or something like it – Matisse's diagnoses changed as he aged). Bedridden in hospital, Matisse was unable to work, or even to walk. It was assumed that he would recover, continue his apprenticeship and graduate to a higher office. But radical, life-altering change came from an unlikely quarter. His mother, Anna Héloise, gave him some paints, brushes and canvases, hoping to take his mind off his convalescence.