A Ressaca (Suzanne Valadon)

The woman slumped at this café table beside an empty glass is Suzanne Valadon, and in Montmartre in 1888 she was known as an artists' model, not yet as an artist. As a girl she had worked in a circus, fallen from a trapeze, and drifted into posing for the painters of the hill. Toulouse-Lautrec, her friend and for a time her lover, set her here more or less as a private joke, the morning-after mood staged after one of his own late parties. The title calls it a hangover, and the loose, quick handling matches the subject. Valadon had been drawing all her life, though, and within a few years she was exhibiting her own paintings, in time the first woman admitted to the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts.