▲ French, Painter and Artist;s Model

Valadon spent nearly 40 years of her life as an artist. The subjects of her drawings and paintings, such as Joy of Life (1911), included mostly female nudes, female portraits, still lifes, and landscapes. She never attended the academy and was never confined within a tradition.

As a model Valadon appeared in such paintings as Pierre-Auguste Renoir's 1883 Dance at Bougival and Dance in the City, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec's 1885 portrait.

Valadon helped to educate herself in art by observing the artists at work for whom she posed. She was considered a very focused, ambitious, rebellious, determined, self-confident, and passionate woman.

In the early 1890s, she befriended Edgar Degas who, impressed with her bold line drawings and fine paintings, purchased her work and encouraged her; she remained one of his closest friends until his death. Art historian Heather Dawkins believed that Valadon's experience as a model added depth to her own images of nude women, which tended to be less idealized than that of the male post impressionists representations.

The most recognizable image of Valadon would be in Renoir's Dance at Bougival from 1883, the same year that she posed for Dance in the City.

In 1885, Renoir painted her portrait again as Girl Braiding Her Hair. Another of his portraits of her in 1885, Suzanne Valadon, is of her head and shoulders in profile. Valadon frequented the bars and taverns of Paris with her fellow painters, and she was Toulouse-Lautrec's subject in his oil painting The Hangover.

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