Matisse the Master: The conquest of colour, 1909-1954 by Hilary Spurling

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In this second part of her inspired and innovative biography of Matisse, Hilary Spurling justifies the genre of the artist's biography in a way that only a few writers - John Richardson in his life of Picasso, Fiona MacCarthy in her William Morris - have succeeded in doing. Nothing can be more pointless than an anecdotal life in which the biographer avoids their subject's work, just as the life which tries also to be a catalogue raisonné (such as René Huyghe's astonishingly tedious life of that un-tedious man Delacroix) is fundamentally split in its intentions.

What is remarkable about this book is the way that Spurling enters into the character of her subject, communicating his charm, his obsessiveness and restlessness, his enjoyment of life, his vulnerability, the tensions within him, and - hardest of all - his creativity. While she discusses his (relatively restrained) personal life, she indulges in none of the sensation-seeking, the post-Romantic fascination with sexual peccadilloes, which have marked some recent studies of this type.

This is a study of the man and of his times. The changing settings that Matisse created for himself are evoked with unfailing sensitivity and empathy, whether the mundane villa on the outskirts of Paris where he and his wife chaotically attempted bourgeois bliss, or the austerity of anonymous hotel rooms in exotic locations, or the light-filled and inspiring city of Nice where he lived like "a penitential hermit" before, during and after the Second World War. Spurling tells the story of the artist's difficult marriage and ultimate divorce, of his relationship with his children, and his sometimes painful and always self-deprecating friendships with other artists. But she never allows these compelling narratives to distract from the ultimate purpose and justification of her book: the man's artistic achievement.

Spurling, also the curator of the current Royal Academy exhibition of Matisse, has been researching this book for ten years, and it shows. One of her successes has been to gain the confidence of Matisse's descendants, who have allowed her "unprecedented and unrestricted access" to his voluminous and vivid correspondence, very little of it published. Her footnotes reveal an extremely wide range of sources, some familiar but many taken from previously unresearched primary material.

What is particularly impressive is her ability to weave this huge amount of material into an easy and, at one level, entertaining narrative, with her subject's voice as one of many. Her touching account of Matisse's relationship with the elderly Renoir in the south of France is a good example of her artistry. Lucid and unhurried as it is, this is a major work of scholarship which must transform our view of the artist's work.

One of the aspects of Matisse's life that emerges most strongly from this biography is its precariousness. It is remarkable how near to the edge of poverty he often was, even late in life. Even though he became internationally famous as an elderly man, he was dogged not only by the difficulties of the Second World War but by the relatively small number of his reliable patrons: the great pre-Revolutionary Russian collector Sergei Shchukin, the Stein sisters, the determined Etta Cone of Baltimore, who steadily built up an outstanding Matisse collection, and in a different league the monomaniacal Albert C Barnes of Philadelphia, who commissioned major works from the artist and then never allowed anyone to see them.

Spurling is particularly successful in evoking the character of these patrons and their relationships with the artist, as well as the way they variously directed or acquiesced to him. This narrative is sustained by her sensitivity and her ability to convey - often through quotation - the artist's emotions as well as the physical process of creating the work. Spurling stresses that for Matisse the real mistress was the art of painting.

Popular as he is today, Matisse had to deal with an often hostile public, inducing panic and even fear in those who saw his work for the first time. He aroused violent and angry press reaction in the middle part of his life, and scepticism from other artists. His relationship with Picasso was famously fraught, with Matisse always tending to be seen as the less serious and more decorative.

For those who persisted, however, his work always brought its rewards. Shchukin spent an hour each day alone studying the works he had bought, and becoming persuaded of their quality. The book conveys the impact that the artist's works made on the spectator seeing them for the first time. Ironically, in the 1930s, when he was beginning to sell well, his children and others suggested that he had lost his way and was becoming facile.

Often assessing Matisse's work through the words of his contemporaries, Spurling gives an entertaining account of his reception in England, where the Bloomsbury Group (rich in third-rate artists) were reserved in their admiration, particularly since he had been taken up by a smart set in London of whom they disapproved. The biographer's feeling for the period creates one of the most pleasurable aspects of the book: its evocation of life in artistic circles, whether Paris around 1910, St Petersburg before 1914 or the south of France during the Second World War.

The book is elegantly designed and handsomely produced, and contains remarkable archival photographic material, much from the Matisse Archive in Paris, though one might regret that in a life of an artist dedicated to colour there are not more colour plates. Matisse frequently painted his own studios, in a variety of moods, and for visitors they exerted a strong appeal. As Spurling writes of them, late in the artist's life, "Many people felt in his studios at Vence or Cimiez as if they had entered another world, or crossed into a different dimension".

The biographer achieves something rather similar here. Matisse is not directly described in this biography; rather, his character and his creativity are suggested by innumerable touches, as it were, of paint. Spurling has shown herself a writer worthy of her subject.

Giles Waterfield is a curator and Heritage Lottery Fund trustee; his novel 'The Hound in the Left-hand Corner' is published by Review

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