Akt mit blauem Schal

By 1930 Suzanne Valadon had spent decades on the other side of this arrangement. As a young woman in Montmartre she modelled for Renoir and Puvis de Chavannes, watching closely how men painted the female body, before teaching herself to paint it. Here she is about 65, self-taught and with no interest in flattering her subject. The woman sits near a fireplace, wrapped in a heavy blue drape she grips in one fist, her form built from firm dark outlines rather than soft light. Valadon's son, Maurice Utrillo, grew up to be a painter as well. The canvas reached the Unterlinden Museum in Colmar only in 2008, in a large bequest of French modern art from a single collector.