Suzanne Valadon

During her life Suzanne Valadon was seen as an outcast and an extreme individual. She was born as the illegitimate child of a laundress and took all sorts of odd jobs in her early life in order to survive. She worked as a circus performer until the age of 16 at which time she fell off a trapeze. Because she desired a profession that was less prone to injury, Valadon decided to become an artist’s model. She posed for artists such as Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. She served as a subject for Renoir's The Bathers. Mingling with Impressionists in the clubs and cabarets of Montmartre, she caused a stir with her provocative stunts. When she was 18 years old, Valadon gave birth to an illegitimate son, the future artist Maurice Utrillo. While modeling for various artists, Valadon paid careful attention to their manner of painting and the construction of their canvases. Without any formal training Suzanne Valadon began to paint on her own. One of the first people to see her work was Toulouse-Lautrec, who encouraged her to continue to pursue painting as a career. Edgar Degas was in fact so taken with her drawings that he became the first to purchase an example of her work, even though she was largely self-taught and lacking any formal academic training at any one of the respected schools in Paris. The bohemian and unconventional style of Valadon’s paintings captured the attention of the bourgeois society and was cause for much uproar during her time. The acclaim with which she is rewarded today was very slow in coming during her lifetime. Although her work was not always looked upon with approval, her audacity and daring nature finally won her a solo exhibition in 1915.

She was known to have posed for the great artists Toulouse-Lautrec and Renoir, the latter becoming her lover and one of her greatest admirers. Valadon reveled in the bohemian artistic scene of Montmartre in the 1880’s and 1890’s before coming into her own as an artist during the early years of the 20th century. She became the first woman to be granted entrance to the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. The boldness of her line and the unstoppable sexuality of her candid and powerfully conceived nudes continued to scandalize many of the art patrons of the day. Still she persevered and being the ultimate perfectionist, often worked on a picture for thirteen years before pronouncing it done. Tales of her free-wheeling lifestyle often took precedence over any admiration for or careful study of her art until recently.