The illegitimate daughter of a country sewing maid, Suzanne Valadon grew up as a street urchin in Montmartre. Compared to Victorian Britain, late 19th-century France was a place of incredible sexual licence. Almost by miracle, the impoverished Valadon evaded the pimps of Montmartre to become a circus acrobat, until she injured her back in a fall. At the age of fifteen, she modelled for Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, then one of France's most respected painters.
Valadon's story, from her late teens until she died at her easel in 1938, paralleled the history of French art, and June Rose has skilfully interwoven the life of this extraordinary woman with a portrait of her time. In Montmartre's Cafe Guerbois, we meet the eccentric Paul Cezanne spurning the dandy Edouard Manet. "Cezanne reserved his particular scorn for Manet, who always appeared impeccably dressed with silver-topped cane, doeskin gloves and a silk topper," Rose writes. "On one occasion, after shaking hands all round, Cezanne refused to offer his hand to the man-about-town: `I haven't washed for a week, Monsieur Manet,' he growled, `so I am not going to offer you my hand!' "
This was the world that Suzanne Valadon lived in. She posed for some of Auguste Renoir's greatest masterpieces, including "Dance at Bougival" and "The Bathers". Known then as Maria, Valadon slept with most of her painter employers, and Renoir's fiancee was so jealous that she rubbed Valadon's face out of "Dance in the Country", insisting that Renoir replace it with her own, less attractive, features.
While the painters around her fought the dictatorship of the Salon, the official art exhibition, Valadon gave birth to an illegitimate son, Maurice Utrillo - father unknown - in 1883.
She modelled in the daytime and spent evenings at the Chat Noir and Lapin Agile cabarets, while her ageing mother Madeline looked after baby Maurice. Somehow she found time to draw in secret.
It was Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, another of Valadon's employers and lovers, who encouraged her to take her firm-lined drawings of Maurice and Madeleine to the great master, Edgar Degas. "You are one of us," the reclusive Degas told her at their first meeting, which started a long friendship. He bought one of her drawings, and Valadon recorded: "That day I had wings." She would know virtually every great painter of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Modigliani called her "the only woman in Paris who understands me". Picasso attended her funeral.
Valadon enchanted the composer Erik Satie, who wrote her a tender love-note in 1893: "Impossible to stop thinking about your whole being; you are inside me completely; everywhere I see only your exquisite eyes, your gentle hands and your little child's feet." Satie was devastated when Valadon left him for a wealthy stockbroker, Paul Mousis, whom she married in 1896.
But bourgeois existence did not suit Valadon. Her inspiration dried up, and in 1909, at the age of forty-four, she left the security of life with Mousis for her lover Andre Utter, an acquaintance of her son's who was twenty-one years her junior. Utter encouraged her to paint and her passion for him inspired some of her best work.
In later life, Utter became jealous of Suzanne - whom he married during the first World War - and her son Maurice. Utrillo was debilitated by alcoholism, but his paintings of Montmartre street scenes supported the "unholy family" of three, with Utter acting as business manager. Eclipsed by the success of Utrillo, Suzanne Valadon received only a small measure of the recognition she deserved in her lifetime. June Rose's beautifully illustrated, vibrant biography does justice to her.
Lara Marlowe is the France and Maghreb correspondent of Irish Times France.
