Suzanne Valadon (1865-1938) was one of the most singular figures in French art of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, whose remarkable trajectory from artist's model to major painter has secured her a lasting place within the history of European modernism. Born Marie-Clémentine Valadon in Bessines-sur-Gartempe near Limoges, she was the illegitimate daughter of a French laundress and spent much of her life in the artists' village of Montmartre. During her lifetime she was seen as an outcast and as an extreme individual, and from the age of ten she supported herself through a range of odd jobs, working as a milliner's apprentice, a waitress, a nanny, and an acrobat for the Mollier Circus, until at the age of sixteen she fell from a trapeze. Seeking a profession less prone to injury, she decided to become an artist's model, capitalizing on her great beauty and her athletic build.

Valadon went on to pose for such artists as Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, all of whom became her lovers at one time or another. She also became friends with Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Pablo Picasso, and Amedeo Modigliani. While modeling, Valadon paid careful attention to the working methods of the artists around her, absorbing their approaches to composition and technique. Without any formal training, she began to paint on her own. One of the first people to see her work was Toulouse-Lautrec, who greatly liked what he saw and encouraged her to pursue painting as a career. Edgar Degas also became an early supporter, and in 1894 she became the first woman admitted to the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts.

A perfectionist, Valadon worked for thirteen years on her oil paintings before ever showing them publicly. After numerous affairs, a few failed marriages, and great difficulties with her alcoholic son and the celebrated painter Maurice Utrillo, Valadon began to paint seriously in 1909, when she was already forty-four years old. She painted portraits, landscapes, still lifes, and especially female nudes, and her images are unforgettable in their vibrant and powerful colors, which recall the Post-Impressionist and Fauve styles. The bohemian and unconventional character of her paintings captured the attention of bourgeois society and caused considerable uproar in her era.

The acclaim she receives today was slow to arrive during her lifetime. Her audacity and daring nature eventually won her a solo exhibition in 1915 that was both critically and commercially successful, and she went on to have four major retrospectives during her life, becoming one of the outstanding women artists of the School of Paris. She exhibited often with her son Maurice Utrillo and her second husband André Utter. Valadon died in 1938 and was buried in the Cimetière de Saint-Ouen in Paris. Her funeral was attended by many notable figures from the Parisian art community, including Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and André Derain.