When asked about a clay model of a nude woman with abnormal legs, he picked up a small Javanese statue with a head all out of proportion to the body and asked: “Is not that beautiful?” His interviewer answered, “I see no beauty where there is lack of proportion. To my mind no sculpture has ever equaled that of the Greeks, unless it be Michael Angelo’s.” He replied: “But there you are, back to the classic, the formal. We of today are trying to express ourselves _today_--_now_--the _twentieth century_--and not to copy what the Greeks saw and felt in art over two thousand years ago. The Greek sculptors always followed a set, fixed form, and never showed any sentiment. The very early Greeks and the Primitives only worked from the basis of emotion, but this grew cold, and disappeared in the following centuries. It makes no difference what are the proportions, _if there is feeling_. And if the sculptor who modeled this makes me think only of a dwarf, then he has failed to express the beauty which should overpower all lack of proportion, and this is only done through or by means of his emotions. “My favorite masters are Goya, Durer, Rembrandt, Corot, and Manet. I often go to the Louvre, and there I study Chardin’s work more than any other; I go there to study his technic.” His palette was a large one, and so chaotic and disorderly were the vivid colors on it that a close resemblance could be traced to some of his pictures. “I never mix much; I use small brushes and never more than twelve colors. I use black to cool the blue. “I seldom paint portraits; and, if I do, only in a decorative manner. I can see them in no other way.” One’s ideas of the man and of his work are entirely opposed to each other: The latter abnormal to the last degree, and the man an ordinary, healthy individual, such as one meets by the dozen every day. On this point Matisse showed some emotion. “Oh, do tell the American people that I am a normal man; that I am a devoted husband and father; that I have three fine children; that I go to the theater, ride horseback, have a comfortable home, a fine garden that I love, flowers, etc., just like any man.” As if to bear out this description of himself, he took me to the salon in his perfectly normal house, to see a normal copy which he had made at the Louvre, and he bade me good-by and invited me to call again like a perfectly normal gentleman.[28] Matisse differs from Cézanne, VanGogh, Gauguin, in the accentuation of _feeling_ as distinguished from observation. While the three last named sought fresh inspiration from close and ever closer contact with nature, he seeks his inspiration in his own emotions. It is this trait that makes him one of the leaders of Post-Impressionism, as well as a Fauve.