'There's nothing to be done but to live in and for yourself - today you're a great genius - tomorrow they'll despise you - it's only natural.'

At the close of her first volume, The Unknown Matisse, Hilary Spurling left us with Matisse just short of his fortieth birthday in 1909, tentatively toasting the future. For twenty years he had lived hand to mouth, accepting ridicule and misunderstanding, relying on a few buyers like Sarah Stein, (Gertrude Stein's sister-in-law), to put food on the table and pay the rent.

His family life was his absolute support. His wife Amelie was no doormat, but she had decided at the beginning of their marriage that The Work was what mattered, and that it was her duty to provide whatever Matisse needed to go on painting.

One of Hilary Spurling's many important re-readings of Matisse, is his relationship with his wife, and her complicity in their way of life. Spurling argues against the commonplace doctrine of the insensitive egotistical domestic tyrant sacrificing everyone's happiness for the canvas, and offers instead a creative partnership and a high seriousness shared by the whole family, children included

Matisse believed that painting could re-frame and re-shape the world; a way of seeing that was a corrective to the blurs and blandishments of ordinary life. The exalted power of art was no conceit for him, neither was it a defence against personal inadequacy, as Freud espoused. Art was a true cause, and a truth in its own right. Whether or not we agree, whether or not his critics agreed or understood this, is irrelevant. Spurling makes clear again and again that to recognise the man, we must recognise what he believed in. Negative appraisals, whether feminist or Freudian, get us no nearer to our aim; which is surely to make a vital connection between the life and the work.

It is strange that fifty years after his death there has been no real attempt until now to make the connections honestly. Spite, rumour, innuendo and gossip, were as commonplace in Matisse's Paris as they are today. Affairs with his models, double-dealing with the galleries, charges of being either incomprehensible or a cheap crowd-pleaser, dogged Matisse in life and long after. His introverted nature, and the fact that unlike Picasso, he wanted no followers, and was not a chef d'ecole, made his contemporaries confused and suspicious. That he seemed to have no interest in keeping any supporters he gained, left him open to the kind of criticism that Picasso with his loyal band was always able to dismiss or deflect. By the 1930's Picasso was hailed as the great renovator of art, and Matisse, although wealthy and well-known, was increasingly dismissed as a minor decorator. His one time friend Derain claimed that Matisse was not a colourist but 'a dye-worker.'

Yet, in 1909, his work was seen as so forbidding and ferocious that few would risk paying for it. His salvation came in the unlikely form of a fabulously rich Russian textile trader named Shchukin, who many dismissed as a buffoon, yet whose instinct and untrained eye, built him one of the best collections of modern art in the world. Revolution in Russia, and later Communism, saw his entire collection sequestered, and some of Matisse's best work, bought before the Great War, was not seen again in the West until long after his death in 1954.

Matisse lived and worked through two World Wars, the Spanish Civil War, the Wall Street Crash, the Depression, and Rationing. Hilary Spurling writes so well about the man in his context - something that is now easily overlooked as we stare amazed at the pictures.

Both wars lost him work - either looted or seized or sold by suddenly penniless patrons. Sarah Stein's collection ended up in the flat of a grain merchant in Copenhagen. Poverty after the wars made buyers hard to come by, so that in spite of growing fame and acclaim, Matisse's income was never secure, and the money he made went to support his family, who had few prospects in war-torn France and its aftermath.

Matisse's reputation split in two at the beginning of the 1920's. The work of the pre-war period still had audiences and critics alike recoiling in disgust - three early Matisse canvases in a mixed show at the Metropolitan Museum in New York in 1921 were denounced as pathological, while his new work was selling as never before.

This did him no good with his Fauvist champions who accused him of bowing to bourgeois taste - 'he's given in, he's calmed down, the public is on his side', was the bitter reaction from former friends when the French state bought its first Matisse canvas - Odalisque in Red. Matisse responded wearily, 'If one isn't hurt by their malice, one is by their stupidity.'