Matisse the Master: a life of Henri Matisse - the conquest of colour, 1909-1954 Hilary Spurling Hamish Hamilton, 512pp, £25 ISBN 0241133394

Looking at Matisse's serene art, we might well imagine that the man himself was equally unruffled. He looks placid enough on the cover of the second and concluding volume of Hilary Spurling's revelatory biography. Lying on a sensuous red-and-white bedspread, the bearded and bespectacled painter looks professorial as he gazes down at his notebook. But the truth, as Spurling discloses, is at odds with this tranquil image.

By 1909, Henri Matisse had reached his zenith as an artist. Already notorious as the leader of Les Fauves - known as "wild beasts" for their inflammatory colours and impetuous brushwork - he was often reviled. Art students in Chicago burned copies of his most hated works and staged a trial for treason of the man they nicknamed Henry Hairmattress. But supporters of adventurous art admired him, and the wealthy Russian collector Sergei Ivanovich Shchukin commissioned him to create two enormous paintings for his Moscow mansion. The outcomes, Dance and Music, were audacious. And yet, as Matisse grew bolder in paint, his dress and manner became more restrained.

Spurling's new research reveals just how anxious Matisse felt. On the day he first met his future wife, Amelie, he had warned her: "I love you dearly, Mademoiselle, but I shall always love painting more." And this obsession, which produced some of the most sublime achievements in 20th-century art, could be immensely destructive. Spurling detects, beneath Matisse's unremitting experimentation, a "state of barely suppressed panic".

The effort of painting Dance and Music gave him chronic insomnia. He was haunted by forebodings of failure. He was mocked by rival cubists under Picasso's leadership, and his first solo show with the Bernheim-Jeune gallery in Paris, in 1910, was widely vilified. Matisse's depression was reinforced by disastrous floods where he lived, on the outskirts of the city.

A trip to Collioure, the Mediterranean port where he had developed fauvism five years earlier, revived him. He needed the heat and light of the south through- out his life. It gave him the sustenance to complete the Shchukin canvases in 1910, but stress left him exhausted. The death of his father in October crushed his spirits still further. He escaped to Spain, where he suffered an almost complete physical and emotional breakdown.

The crisis was exacerbated when Amelie accused him of being indifferent and unfaithful. They patched things up after his return, but from then on his absorp-tion in work alienated her time and again. Matisse's despondency alternated with emotional eruptions that made impossible demands on his wife and children alike. He could become outrageously tyrannical, and yet his letters are also filled with a profound devotion to his family.

The emotional turbulence charted by Spurling is so overwhelming that I found myself wondering how he managed to produce such lyrical, ordered and often ecstatic paintings over the next decade. He was inspired by stimuli as diverse as the Alhambra in Granada, the Russian icons he discovered on a trip to Moscow, and a subsequent sojourn in Morocco. He loved Tangier, and the Moroccan countryside rekindled memories of his first paintbox: "It was a tremendous attraction, a sort of paradise found in which I was completely free, alone, at peace."

But the upheavals continued when he returned home. "Saturday with Matisse," noted his friend Marcel Sembat in September 1913. "Crazy! weeping! By night he recites the Lord's Prayer! By day he quarrels with his wife!" The miracle is that Matisse managed to produce the poised and superlative Portrait of Mme Matisse during this period. Even when the First World War broke out and the army requisitioned his house, the quality of his work did not falter. Although worried about his elderly mother trapped in German-occupied Bohain, and then horrified to learn that his brother had been deported to a prison camp in eastern Germany, Matisse succeeded in painting many of his greatest, most rigorous and innovative works.

Only after the Armistice did his art decline for a while. Settling in Nice, he spent the following decade producing canvases of passive young women seated or reclining in ornamental interiors. The avant-garde dismissed him, and even his own family censured the paintings' lack of ambition. In 1930, however, he set off for Tahiti, hoping that Gauguin's island would revive his flagging inspiration. He was not disappointed. On his return, Matisse embarked on The Dance, a col-ossal work for the American collector Albert C Barnes which announced a new appetite for taking risks.

Matisse had recovered his powers, but in 1934 Amelie moved out. He responded by sleeping in the studio. In 1939, after what one eyewitness described as "a perpetual pitiless struggle", Amelie departed for good, and bitter legal battles ensued. The advent of the Second World War turned Matisse's life into a nightmare. Plagued by ill-health, he was looked after by Lydia Delectorskaya, who'd started as his model but ended up supervising every aspect of his increasingly vulnerable existence.

Now a frail old man, Matisse nevertheless gained a new vitality by working with painted paper cut-outs. In December 1947, he devised the first plans for a new chapel for the Dominicans in Vence and set to work, galvanised by the possibility of enlivening its interior with murals, sculpture, chalice cloths and luminous stained-glass windows. Over the next four years, this chapel dominated his life.

The immense task ended in triumph, but it took its toll. He died of heart failure in November 1954, a day after making four final sketches of Lydia with her hair wrapped in a towel turban. Looking at the last one, he said gravely: "It will do." So will Spurling's biography, a tour de force that transforms our understanding of this haunted man and his exuberant, irresistible art.

Four paperbacks of Richard Cork's critical writings on modern art, 1970-2000, are published by Yale University Press

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