Matisse, Father & Son, a revealing and moving biography, is based upon exclusive access to several thousand unpublished letters in the archives of Pierre Matisse. These include more than 800 letters, many of them twelve or thirteen pages long, between Pierre Matisse and his father. They also include a vast correspondence with the European artists whom Pierre Matisse represented during his sixty years as an art dealer in New York.

But this is more than a book of letters, John Russell, former chief art critic for The New York Times, has produced a seamless narrative that moves easily back and forth between private life and professional life. The heart of this absorbing biography is the near daily correspondence between father and son over three decades.

Mining thousands of letters in which nothing is held back - and including photos of family and friends, as well as significant works handled by Pierre Matisse - John Russell offers us an insider's view into the lives and creative efforts of some of the century's most important artists.