Suzanne Valadon
This painting is for our great fan and supporter, William - who is also a huge cat lover (like most of our team:). Thank you Bill!
Suzanne Valadon didn't have an easy life. Her mother was an unmarried laundress and her father was probably a young man who worked at the nearby mill and was killed soon after Marie-Clémentine’s birth. Madeleine, her mother, moved herself and her baby to Montmartre to escape the scandal. While in her early teens, she was apprenticed to a dressmaker in Paris, and soon after she joined an acrobatics group. At the tender age of 15 a neighbour had led her to the Place Pigalle, where she was to become an artist’s model. She became a model for Puvis de Chavannes, Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec, who changed her name from Marie-Clémentine to Suzanne.
In 1893 she succeeded in meeting and impressing Degas. On the advice of Lautrec, she took her drawings and showed them to the reclusive genius. It is said that Degas took one look at her drawings and said, “you are one of us!”
Valadon's paintings are brutally honest, they force us to react to their boldness and their unschooled intensity. She still cannot be classified in one group, or as the follower of any particular artist; she taught herself and thereby formed a style all her own.
Her work is exhibited in many of the finest museums and galleries throughout the world.
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