Fauve Matisse was an extremely slick and powerful natural media
paint and image manipulation program. It sold for a fraction of the
price of the market leader Fractal Design Painter, and had a number
of more powerful features like floating layers in its early versions.
Matisse (and Fauve Software) died when the two brothers who owned it
bet the farm on a high-end image-manipulation program called X-res -
and lost. Ironically, X-res (and Matisse)was acquired by
Macromedia.,While X-res continued to be published by Macromedia,
Matisse was allowed to slip into a quiet grave." (And Macromedia was in turn bought out by Adobe).
software that supported multiple free-floating layers of images.