Le bonheur de vivre (The joy of Life), is a  painting by Henri Matisse. In the central background of the piece is a group of figures that is similar to the group depicted in his painting The Dance (second version).

According to Hilton Kramer “Le bonheur de vivre owing to its long sequestration in the collection of the Barnes Foundation, which never permitted its reproduction in color, is the least familiar of modern masterpieces. Yet this painting was Matisse’s own response to the hostility his work had met with in the Salon d’Automne of 1905, a response that entrenched his art even more deeply in the esthetic principles that had governed his Fauvist paintings which had caused a furor and which did so on a far grander scale, too.”

Henri Matisse

Early life and education

Woman Reading, 1894, Museum of Modern Art, Paris

Henri-Émile-Benoît Matisse was born in Le Cateau-Cambrésis, Nord, France, he grew up in Bohain-en-Vermandois, Picardie, France, where his parents owned a seed business. He was their first son. In 1887 he went to Paris to study law, working as a court administrator in Le Cateau-Cambrésis after gaining his qualification. He first started to paint in 1889, when his mother had brought him art supplies during a period of convalescence following an attack of appendicitis. He discovered “a kind of paradise” as he later described it, and decided to become an artist, deeply disappointing his father. In 1891, he returned to Paris to study art at the Académie Julian and became a student of William-Adolphe Bouguereau and Gustave Moreau. Initially he painted still-lifes and landscapes in the traditional Flemish style, at which he achieved reasonable proficiency. Chardin was one of Matisse’s most admired painters; as an art student he made copies of four Chardin paintings in the Louvre. In 1896 he exhibited 5 paintings in the salon of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, and the state bought two of his paintings.In 1897 and 1898, he visited the painter John Peter Russell on the island Belle Île off the coast of Brittany. Russell introduced him to Impressionism and to the work of van Gogh (who had been a good friend of Russell but was completely unknown at the time). Matisse’s style changed completely, and he would later say “Russell was my teacher, and Russell explained colour theory to me.”