Suzanne Valadon

Born Marie-Clémentine Valadon at Bessines-sur-Gartempe in 1865, she spent her early years posing for the major painters of her era - Renoir put her in Dance at Bougival (1883) and Dance in the City, Toulouse-Lautrec in Suzanne Valadon (1885) and The Hangover (1887-1889). She never attended academy, never locked into a tradition, and in 1894 became the first woman painter admitted to the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. For nearly four decades she worked in paint and drawing: female nudes, portraits, still lifes, landscapes like Joy of Life (1911) - subjects rendered without the idealizing gloss her male contemporaries preferred. She also painted the male nude, a boundary no woman artist had crossed in that world. She died in 1938, mother to painter Maurice Utrillo.