"Fifty years after his death, Matisse the Master shows us the painter as he saw himself. With unprecedented and unrestricted access to his voluminous family correspondence, and other new material in private archives, Hilary Spurling documents a lifetime of desperation and self-doubt, exacerbated by Matisse's attempts to counter-act the violence and disruption of the twentieth century in paintings that seem now effortlessly serene, radiant and stable." "Here for the first time is the truth about Matisse's models, especially two Russians: his pupil Olga Meerson (whose hitherto unknown portrait of Matisse lying on his studio couch is on the dust jacket) and the extraordinary Lydia Delectorskaya, who became his studio manager, secretary and companion in the last two decades of his life." "But every woman who played an important part in Matisse's life was remarkable in her own right, not least his beloved daughter Marguerite, whose honesty and courage surmounted all ordeals, including interrogation and torture by the Gestapo in World War II." "If you have ever wondered how anyone with such a tame, dull public image as Matisse could have painted such rich, powerful, mysteriously moving pictures, let alone produced the radical cut-paper and stained-glass inventions of his last years, here is the answer. They were made by the real Matisse, whose true story has been written down at last from start to finish by his first biographer, Hilary Spurling."--BOOK JACKET.