Henri Matisse was a French artist, known for his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a printmaker and sculptor, but is best known as a painter. Matisse is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp, as one of the three artists who helped to define the revolutionary developments in the arts in the opening decades of the twentieth century. His mastery of the expressive language of colour and drawing, displayed in a body of work spanning over a half-century, has won him recognition as a leading figure in the development of modern art.