Born on this day in 1865, at Bessines-sur-Gartempe: Marie-Clémentine Valadon, who became Suzanne. Acrobat first, until a fall ended that; then model, standing still for hours in other people's studios while the light moved across the floor. Look at the two paintings below and you are looking at both halves of her life. The dancing couple is Renoir's, and the woman in the red bonnet leaning into her partner is generally taken to be her — the paint soft, the earth of the dance floor scuffed pale. In the framed canvas, the young woman among bare trees is built of short hatched strokes of violet, pink and green, the mauve dress catching what light there is.
What she took from those years was not the softness. Her own line, when she began to draw in earnest, came down hard and dark around a body: a contour you could cut yourself on, no flattery in it, no apology. She had watched it made from the far side of the easel — Degas, who bought her drawings and encouraged her; Renoir; Toulouse-Lautrec — and she took the craft without the manner.
In 1894 she was the first woman painter admitted to the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. She painted until 1938, and raised a painter, Maurice Utrillo, along the way. Six years in front of one picture taught me that the model is never only furniture. Sometimes she is the one taking notes.
Fabien, the lovely part of the Degas story is that he bought her drawings and praised exactly the thing she was after — the hardness of the line, not the prettiness. I'm paraphrasing rather than quoting, but the effect was a young woman hearing her own intention named out loud by someone who knew.
Fabien, the trapeze detail always stays with me: she worked a circus ring until a fall ended it, and only then took up standing still for other people. Performers who lose the body they worked with rarely lose the eye — she had already learned to hold a pose and read a room from inside it.