The Abandoned Doll

Suzanne Valadon learned painting from the inside of it. As a teenager in Montmartre she modeled for Renoir, Degas and others, watching how they worked, then began making her own pictures. By the time she painted this in 1921 she had her own subject: real women's bodies, sitting and slumping and turning away, nothing like the idealized nudes she had once posed for. A mother leans in to towel a girl dry after a bath, and the girl pulls back to study herself in a hand mirror. On the floor lies a doll with a pink bow, the same bow the girl is wearing. Valadon knew them — they were her niece and the girl's mother.