Artist Birthday: Suzanne Valadon

Suzanne Valadon was a popular model for Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists. She was inspired by their work to teach herself drawing an painting and established herself as a successful painter in her own right.

Artist Birthday for 23 September: Suzanne Valadon (1867-1938 France)

Suzanne Valadon, Madame Zamaron, 1922, oil on canvas, 82 x 66 cm Image © 2025 The Museum of Modern Art, New York (MOMA-P2241)

During her modeling years, between sessions, Valadon would sketch people in various poses, teaching herself the nuances of anatomy and pose. This painting dates from the period of her mature style long after she had left Impressionism behind. Valadon always believed that good drawing was basic to painting, and this is reflected in the linearity of the figure. The linear quality, as well as the contrasting brightly patterned shawl may also be an influence from the many single female figures painted by Henri Matisse (1869-1954) during the same decade. This portrait reflects the late Post-Impressionist preference for broad planes of color with less modulation or attention to sculpture form. The quiet, thoughtful pose shows how accomplished Valadon's artistic attention to the details of human movement had excelled.

Background

By the 1880s in France, Impressionism was no longer the pioneering movement it had been. It was generally accepted by both critics and the public. Many of the avant-garde artists of the early twentieth century started out painting in an impressionist style, but developed beyond it because of the limitations caused by its emphasis on momentary effects of light and color. Rather than do away with Impressionism, artists who followed wanted to carry it further.

The Post-Impressionists are the artists who followed, and they painted in a variety of different variations on elements of Impressionism. They experimented with subject matter, added pathos, increased emphasis on decorative qualities of the two-dimensional surface, and rejected the impressionist credo of painting outdoors on the spot to create a “snapshot” of light and color.

Suzanne Valadon, the daughter of a single-mother working woman, survived on her own from the age of ten or twelve through her innate intelligence and resourcefulness. She had little formal education. She was first exposed to art as a teenager when she began to frequent the bars and cafés of the Montmartre section of Paris where the members of the artistic avant-garde (at that time the impressionists) lived. She modeled for the impressionists Edgar Degas (1834-1917) and Auguste Renoir (1848-1919), and the Post-Impressionist Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901), among others. It was in the studio of Degas where she began producing drawings in pastels in bold linear style from 1883 onwards. She taught herself how to paint based on observing the various artists for whom she modeled.