At the conclusion of The Unknown Matisse, author Hilary Spurling leaves the story of Henri Matisse in 1908, after giving readers a better understanding of why the painter, revered for his skill at handling color and pattern, had succumbed to a dark period and a somber palette.

A financial scandal involving his wife's family, and the fall-out, had cast a pall on the artist's life.

In Spurling's new Matisse the Master: A Life of Henri Matisse, the Conquest of Colour, 1909-1954, the author takes us on the long journey through the second half of the artist's life. And while there are no incidents like that earlier eruption, the life of Matisse - in work, family, and relationships - hardly was placid.

In work, he was misunderstood, to be sure. In some circles, he was considered delusional: What, after all, was he doing with those wild colors and that illusory sense of perspective, where walls faded into space or where a line of figures could shift from hot to cold in a flash?

Others found him timid or old-fashioned, a condition not helped by the fact that in public he dressed in conservative tweeds (he painted in his pajamas): What was up with those still lifes, for instance, or his continuing dependence on the figure, no matter that they often emerged with odd-colored skin or blank, blank eyes? Or that, at the end of his life, he was making paper cutouts some deemed childish play?

In family, he immersed himself in work to such a degree that it threatened his health and strained relations with his wife and children, to the point that the former left him and the latter found it easier to communicate with papa by letter.

And in other relationships, Matisse was caught between his need for models and the resultant gossip, as well as his reliance on generous art collectors, who also needed to be knowledgeable and patient.

In short, it is the story of a creative man who, at times, alienated those around him as he fought the insecurity inherent in those who have a singular drive. That two world wars march through this book, bringing suffering and pain to everyone in their path, only adds to the sad, strained picture Spurling paints.

Still, her research and understanding of an artist's life result in a book that manages to be sensitive and thorough and, occasionally, tart. Spurling, who lives in London and has a background in criticism, mines a wealth of material to place Matisse's work in the context of the time.

There are two sections of color plates in Matisse the Master and copious black-and-white images scattered throughout, which are important, in order to see what the author is describing. More color certainly would have been welcome: He is the master, right?

Thankfully, in the case of The Red Studio, color is provided. Spurling introduces the work as one that demonstrated the artist's ability to disorder perspective and put the planes of a room, as we know it, out of order. In the following scene, those making the trek to the isolated town outside Paris where Matisse had moved his family included one person who tried to match the incongruous nature of Matisse's "room" with the studio in which they stood.

"Visitors to Issy in 1911 grasped immediately that no one had seen or imagined anything like this before," Spurling writes.

"People were brought up short especially by the biggest and most baffling of the four, The Red Studio, which looked like a detached wall segment with rudimentary objects floating or suspended on it. 'The colours of the things in one inexplicable way or other made the wall come alive,' said a Danish painter, examining The Red Studio and trying to relate it to what he saw around him in the white space of the actual studio. 'You're looking for the red wall,' Matisse said amiably, explaining as he regularly did to streams of puzzled colleagues, critics and collectors: 'That wall simply doesn't exist.' From now on he painted realities that existed only in his own mind. It would be nearly 30 years before The Red Studio crossed the Atlantic to America, where it would transform the vision of a whole generation of young New York artists who felt their way toward abstraction not through Picasso and the Cubists or their followers, but through Matisse."

That might be a bit strong, but Picasso and Matisse were the influential giants of the age, competitors and, later, friends who each kept an eye on what the other was doing. As Spurling points out, the fact that so much of Matisse's work was locked away in private collections, or lost, gave Picasso the edge when it came to public recognition.

Matisse the Master makes the case for that title, a painter whose experiments as a Fauve helped jump-start the evolution of modern art, which he continued to explore in new modes of expression until his death in 1954.

His last great work, the design of the chapel at Vence, stirred debate in artistic and religious circles. But people paid attention: Of visitors who had no clue what to do with the unorthodox place, Spurling writes, "From now on, indignant or derisive sightseers demanding to know the meaning of the stations of the cross received a firm response from the nun in charge: 'It means modern.' "

Mary Voelz Chandler is the News art and architecture critic.