Suzanne Valadon was a French painter, born in 1865 in Bessines-sur-Gartempe and dead in Paris in 1938. The illegitimate daughter of a laundress, she worked as a circus acrobat and then as an artist's model in Montmartre, posing for Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec. She is remembered because she became a painter herself, known for frank nudes such as The Blue Room, and as the mother of Maurice Utrillo.
She learned to paint by watching the men who painted her. Then she painted a naked man the way they painted naked women.
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Valadon never studied art. The usual account says that at fifteen a fall from the trapeze injured her back and ended her act at the circus within the year. She posed for painters instead, for Puvis de Chavannes, for Renoir, for Toulouse-Lautrec, and she kept at it for more than ten years.
All that time she was watching. About 1890 she met Edgar Degas, who admired her drawings, bought them, and became a friend for life. In 1894 the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts admitted her on the strength of five drawings, the first woman it had ever taken in.
By then she was a mother, and she never told anyone who the father of her son was.
What You'll Discover
Why Lautrec renamed her.
What a model learned by watching.
Who fathered her son.
Who she left her husband for.
What she saw when she looked back.