Ritratto di Suzanne Valadon

The woman walking toward us in 1885 was born Marie-Clementine Valadon and worked as an artist's model in Montmartre, where she had posed for Renoir and others. Toulouse-Lautrec, her friend, gave her the name she kept: Suzanne, after the biblical Susanna spied on by lecherous old men, a joke about the aging painters she sat for. What most of them did not know was that she drew constantly between poses. Lautrec did know. He titled this portrait Madame Valadon, artiste peintre, painter, taking her ambition seriously years before the public did. She went on to exhibit her own work, and her son, born the year before this was painted, became the painter Maurice Utrillo.