Renoir’s Dancer: The Secret Life of Suzanne Valadon

Hewitt (The Mistress of Paris) considers the unlikely trajectory of French painter and model Suzanne Valadon (1865–1938), who was the child of a housemaid and became the belle of Montmartre as Renoir’s muse and a talented painter in her own right. The book illuminates the social web at the heart of the Paris art scene, focusing on the camaraderie that developed between Valadon and artists Toulouse Lautrec and Edgar Degas, which led her to model for Renoir (she is immortalized in the Dance at Bougival). After Degas recognized the abundant raw talent of the model turned artist, he mentored her, but her bohemian lifestyle grew difficult for her to keep up after she gave birth at age 18 to a son, Maurice. Hewitt persuasively casts Valadon as a pragmatist adept at navigating her public and private lives, resolving Maurice’s uncertain paternity in 1891, then marrying businessman Paul Mousis and exhibiting internationally soon thereafter. Her free spirit prevailed decades later when she fell for her son’s friend, the then-23-year-old painter André Utter, who would became her second husband as well as her business manager. The cast of world-class artists and the stories of their romantic entanglements combine to produce a book that reads like an opera libretto revolving around a pioneering spirit who bristled at the limiting label of “woman artist.” [em](Feb.) [/em]