The story
Henri Matisse was born in this small town in the north of France in 1869, in the flat cotton-and-beet country near the Belgian border. In 1952, a year before he died, he came back in a way: he chose 82 of his own works, gave them to the town, and arranged the display himself, deciding how his paintings, drawings and cut-paper pieces should hang. The first museum opened in the wedding room of the town hall.
It later moved into the Palais Fénelon, an 18th-century mansion in the town named for a former archbishop of Cambrai, and reopened there in 2002 after a long refurbishment. It now holds more than 170 works by Matisse, the third largest such collection in France, shown in the place he came from rather than in Paris or Nice where he made his name. The hang still follows the logic he set out when he picked the first rooms himself.
