REGARDING HENRI
On the last day of 1869, Henri Matisse was born in his grandparents’ dirt-floored weaver’s cottage in the rural French town of Le Cateau-Cambrésis, not far from the Belgian border. The future Fauvist would spend the next 20 years of his life in the area, a largely flat, nearly tree-less expanse of broad fields and small villages marked at the time by factory effluent and the smoking chimneys of beet-sugar refineries and textile mills. It is either an irony or an impetus that, from this drab landscape at the edge of the Flanders plain, Matisse emerged with his magnificent joy of colors.
The artist’s later life on the French Riviera is well documented. But the northeastern towns of his youth remain mostly unsung and largely unvisited. Last March, ahead of the 150th anniversary of Matisse’s birth, I went to France to explore the area that nurtured one of
