Suzanne Valadon

Before she painted anything, Suzanne Valadon was the body in other people's pictures. In 1880s Montmartre she posed for Renoir and for Toulouse-Lautrec, watching from the model's stand how oil was laid down, since she could not afford to be taught any other way. She was drawing all the while, and when Toulouse-Lautrec showed her sheets to Edgar Degas, the older painter bought them and pushed her to take up etching.

At 18 she had a son, Maurice, raised largely by her mother while she worked. He grew up to become the painter Maurice Utrillo, famous for his white Montmartre streets. Valadon herself turned to bold figure painting, drawing nudes with a hard, frank outline that women artists of the time were rarely allowed to attempt, and became in 1894 one of the first women to exhibit at the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts.

She painted her sitters without flattery, their bodies solid and unidealised, and kept working through a long, unconventional life in the same Montmartre streets where she had started as a teenager posing for other hands. When she died in 1938, Derain, Picasso and her old circle came to bury one of their own.