Suzanne VALADON - Women and Child on the riverside : Signed original engraving, 1904

Suzanne Valadon : (1865-1938) pseudonym of Marie-Clémentine Valade, was a french painter. She is the mother of the painter Maurice Utrillo. Suzanne Valadon became a circus acrobat in 1880. In the district of Montmartre, where she settled with her son, the future Maurice Utrillo, she had the possibility to initiate herself to Art. Her beauty attracted a lot of artists. She became their model, observing and learning their technique in the meantime. She was a model for Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, or Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, having relationships with some of them. She was a regular of the Montmartre bar. Toulouse Lautrec made at that time her portrait, titled "the hangover". Edgar Degas noticed her talent and encouraged her. She met success quite fast, and managed to stay away from financiary difficulties, providing for the needs of her son Maurice Valadon, who later took the familiy name of his presumed father, Miguel Utrillo. Suzanne Valadon painted still lifes, bouquets, and stunning landscapes with vibrant colours. She is also well known for her nudes. Her first exhibitions in the beginning of the 1890's showed mainly portraits, among them the portrait of Erik Satie, with whom she had a relationship in 1893. He proposed to her on the morning of their first night. He had apparently with her his only intimate relationship. In 1894, Suzanne Valadon was the first woman admitted at the Société nationale des beaux-arts. She died in 1938, surrounded by her friends André Derain, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. Her works are conserved in numerous Museums, including the Musée national d'Art Moderne de paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Grenoble, the musée des beaux-arts of Lyon. A permanent exhibition is dedicated to her at Bessines-sur-Gartempe (Haute-Vienne), her birth city.