The Nature and Nurture of Genius: The Sweet Illustrated Story of How Henri Matisse’s Childhood Shaped His Creative Legacy

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The Nature and Nurture of Genius: The Sweet Illustrated Story of How Henri Matisse’s Childhood Shaped His Creative Legacy

by Maria Popova

A heartening testament to the nourishing power of parental love in the cultivation of greatness.

At 8PM on the last day of 1869, a little boy named Henri entered the world in a gray textile-mill town in the north of France, in a rundown two-room cottage with a leaky roof. He didn’t have much materially, but he was blessed with perhaps the greatest gift a child could have — an unconditionally loving, relentlessly supportive mother. Like many creative icons whose destinies wereshaped by the unflinching encouragement of loved ones, little Henri became the greatHenri Matisse thanks to his mother’s staunch support, which began with an unusual ignition spark: At the age of twenty, Henri was hospitalized for appendicitis and his mother brought him a set of art supplies with which to occupy his recovery. “From the moment I held the box of colors in my hands,”Matisse recounted, “I knew this was my life. I threw myself into it like a beast that plunges towards the thing it loves.” And that thing flowed from love, too — it was Matisse’s mother who encouraged her son, like E.E. Cummings encouraged all aspiring artists, to disregard the formal rules of art and instead paint from the heart. “My mother loved everything I did,” he asserted. Decades later, thanks toGertrude Stein’s patronage, which catalyzed his career and sparked his friendship with Picasso, the world too would come to love what Matisse did.

In The Iridescence of Birds: A Book About Henri Matisse (public library), writerPatricia MacLachlan and illustrator Hadley Hooper tell the heartening story of young Henri’s childhood and how it shaped his artistic path long before he began painting — how his mother, in an attempt to brighten the drab and sunless days, put bright red rugs on the floors and painted colorful plates to hang on the walls, letting little Henri mix the paints; how his father gave him pigeons, whose iridescent plumage the boy observed with endless fascination; how the beautiful silks woven by the townspeople beguiled him with their bright patterns.

With a gentle sidewise gleam, the story offers a nuanced answer to the eternal nature-versus-nurture question of whether genius is born or made. Embedded in it is a wonderful testament to the idea that attentive presence rather than praise is the key to great parenting, especially when it comes to nurturing young talent. (Indeed, such maternal presence is what legendary editor Ursula Nordstrom provided for many of the young authors and artists — including,most notably, Maurice Sendak — whom she nurtured over the course of her reign as the twentieth century’s greatest patron saint of children’s books.)

For a delightful touch of empathy via a twist of perspective, MacLachlan places the reader in little Henri’s shoes:

If you were a boy named Henri Matisse who lived in a dreary town in northern France where the skies were gray

And the days were cold

And you wanted color and light

And sun,

And your mother, to brighten your days,

Painted plates to hang on the walls

With pictures of meadows and trees,

Rivers and birds,

And she let you mix the colors of paint…

… And you raised Pigeons

Watching their sharp eyes
And red feet,

And their colors that changed with the light
As they moved…

… Would it be a surprise that you became
A fine painter who painted
Light
and
Movement

And the iridescence of birds?

Beneath the biographical particulars of the story itself is MacLachlan’s larger inquiry into the enduring question of whether artists draw what they see or what they feel and remember — Matisse’s life, she writes in the afterword, attests to the fact that the two are inextricably entwined: “He painted his feelings and he painted his childhood.”

Hooper’s illustrations are themselves a masterwork of artistry, scholarship, and creative ingenuity. She spent considerable time studying Matisse’s sensibility and colors in reproductions of his drawings, cutouts, and paintings, then researched textile patterns from the era of his childhood and even used Google Maps to picture the actual streets that he walked as a little boy. The result is not imitation but dimensional celebration. Hooper reflects on the unusual and inventive technique she chose:

I decided to try relief printing, which forced me to simplify my shapes and allowed me to focus on the color and composition. I cut the characters and backgrounds out of stiff foam and cardboard, inked them up, made prints, and scanned the results into Photoshop. The approach felt right.

The Iridescence of Birds is absolutely wonderful, in a way to which the screen does a great injustice. Complement it with other excellent picture-book biographies of luminaries, including those of Jane Goodall, Henri Rousseau,Pablo Neruda, Julia Child, Albert Einstein, and Maria Merian.