Henri Matisse has, in his own words, "hair like Absalom's," but he is far from being a typical Left Bank bohemian art student. ("I plunged head down into work," he says later, "on the principle I had heard, all my young life, expressed by the words 'Hurry up!' Like my parents, I hurried up in my work, pushed by I don't know what, by a force which today I perceive as being foreign to my life as a normal man.")

This work ethic, derived from a middle class, northern French upbringing, is now accompanied by a thoroughly bourgeois appearance—gold-rimmed spectacles; short, carefully trimmed beard; plump, feline body; conservative clothes—an odd fashion statement for a leading member of the Parisian avant-garde.