Gertrude Stein, the American writer and art collector, kept formidable servants. Her cook in Paris, Helene, would use different methods of cooking eggs to honour or insult her employer's guests. For the most honoured, such as Picasso, Helene would make a fancy souffle. Indifferent visitors would get ordinary omelette fines herbes. But when Henri Matisse dropped by, as he often did, Helene would angrily fry the eggs, explaining it thus: "It requires the same amount of eggs and butter, but it is less respectful, and he will understand."
Whether Matisse got the message is unclear. But it is yet another example of the way his career intertwined with that of his young rival Picasso. The Matisse Picasso exhibition at Tate Modern, hailed by many as the art event of the year, ends on 18 August. To mark the occasion, this column will celebrate the artists' lives in food. This week, Matisse; next week, Picasso.
Henri Matisse (1869-1954) was as northern in his upbringing as Picasso was southern. Matisse's father, Hippolyte Henri, ran a seed shop in the small town of Bohain-en-Vermandois, a colourless place for the future fauvist to grow up. Except during festivals, when gingerbread sellers arrived in town, the regional diet was mostly grain and bread, served with vegetables and pickled herrings or the pungent local cheese (maroilles). Little meat was eaten, except for pigeon and charcuterie. The bells of St Quentin, the local town where Matisse went to school, were said to peal out "Tripe and black pudding/Tripe and black pudding". It was a culture nothing like the odalisques and ripe tomatoes of the later Matisse.
But his mother, Anna, an accomplished painter herself, ran a comforting kitchen, which perhaps contributed to that feeling of utter warmth you find in so many Matisse interiors (and almost never get from Picasso). Anna also kept a well-tended herb and vegetable garden and was fond of home remedies, such as lime tea for insomnia (Matisse himself found beer and chips more efficacious).
Home food, though frugal, was abundant and nourishing compared to what Matisse would eat as a starving artist in Paris. When he first enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, Matisse was subsisting on half-portions at a dodgy restaurant on the Faubourg St Denis, where the air was thick with grease and the floor covered with unswept old cutlet bones. A couple of years later, when he was still ill-fed, Matisse splashed out on expensive fruits and flowers not to fill his stomach, but for an ambitious still life titled La Desserte. Not for the first time, he bankrupted himself to "paint summer in a freezing Paris winter", as Hilary Spurling puts it.
It is sometimes said that there is something shallow about Matisse's painting, as if painting bliss required no intelligence. In fact, his citrus bowls and plates of glorious oysters or pretty pink onions, as well as being brilliant compositions, were far from obvious. Matisse was not born into colour; he actively chose it. He also actively chose to paint fruit, and above all oranges, despite the trouble of buying them (during wartime, he said, fruit was "more expensive than a beautiful woman") and despite suffering for a long time from a congenital intestinal disease that limited his pleasure in eating.
Oranges were more than food for Matisse. They were to him what apples were for Cezanne. They became signs of joy, discs of pure colour. One of the proudest moments of Matisse's life was when Picasso bought his Basket of Oranges in 1945. Matisse reciprocated by sending Picasso a crate of real oranges every New Year's Day. As the art historian John Golding puts it, "Matisse believed in the orange's health-giving properties, just as he believed in the restorative, healing properties of his own art."
