Renoir's Dancer

by Catherine Hewitt

  Marie-Clémentine did – and a whole new world was opened up to her.

  When Italian models like Clelia arrived in Paris, they flocked to the quartier around the Place Jussieu on the left bank.14 However, to secure work, they had to venture further north to where the lively model market took place every Sunday morning around the fountain in the Place Pigalle – which, conveniently for Marie-Clémentine, was located just off the Boulevard de Rochechouart.

  The model market was essentially a large, rather chaotic beauty pageant where the competition was fierce, for the prize was unsurpassed: paid work – and perhaps even fame if a girl was lucky enough to be selected by a painter whose work appeared at the Salon.15 The shrewdest girls had taken note of the 1880s vogue for paintings of peasants and rural life, subjects which had become convenient messengers of four key bourgeois values: work, family, religion and patriotism.16 The themes were guaranteed crowd-pleasers. Bourgeois Salon-goers seemed never to tire of them and painters were only too happy to pander to their audience’s tastes. In response, the Italians wisely arrived at the weekly market dressed in their picturesque traditional costume. Doe-eyed girls with olive skin draped themselves provocatively around the fountain, batting their thick eyelashes, hoping to secure a commission and their future.

  It was daunting competition for Marie-Clémentine. She did not boast a picturesque peasant’s costume or the sultry features of her Italian counterparts. She had never taken much time over her appearance. She wore plain, dark clothes with high collars and not so much as a smear of makeup. But her clear, blue eyes, well-defined bone structure and natural complexion were striking. In many ways, Marie-Clémentine had the advantage over the Italians: she was a blank canvas. The Italian girls offered themselves up as pre-determined subjects; with Marie-Clémentine, a painter could make her whatever he wished. It did not take long for a prominent artist to spot that versatility.

  Marie-Clémentine had inherited Madeleine’s scornful disdain towards public curiosity; she playfully allowed a number of stories to circulate about the circumstances of her first commission.17 She was seen by the artist as he looked down on the model market one Sunday morning from his upstairs window, one tale ran. Not at all, countered another; Madeleine had taken on some odd jobs doing laundry for private clients, and on one occasion, had asked Marie-Clémentine to deliver a basket of linen to the said painter’s address. In an elaborated version of that story, Marie-Clémentine had to wait in the hallway for the artist to return before she could deposit her laundry basket. The artist’s colour grinder was also waiting for the master of the house, and he started making unwanted advances towards Marie-Clémentine in the interim, only to have his attempts dramatically thwarted by the entrance of the artist who chivalrously came to Marie-Clémentine’s rescue, demanding in his booming voice: ‘Who is this charming person?’.18 Theories abounded, but on one fact, opinion was unanimous: when Marie-Clémentine was spotted, she landed one of the most enviable commissions imaginable. For the artist who first noticed her was none other than the eminent Pierre Puvis de Chavannes.

  Tall and corpulent with a long face, hoary beard and moustache, and receding hairline, at nearly 60 years old, Puvis de Chavannes had firmly established himself as a figure of authority in the art world. He had a steady gaze, an erect stature and a nose which he self-deprecatingly described as ‘colossal’.19 Impeccably dressed, well mannered and eloquent – the bonhomme, Berthe Morisot’s daughter Julie Manet called him – Puvis presented as an old-fashioned gentleman who knew all the turns of phrase to compliment a lady.20 His endless philosophising, pompous demeanour and readily shared opinions both amused and exasperated his closest companions. Edgar Degas delighted in comparing him to the condor in the Jardin des Plantes, and sometimes referred to him as ‘the peacock’.21 ‘You have no idea how formal and complicated he is,’ Berthe Morisot once groaned to Claude Monet.22 Nonetheless, few could dispute Puvis’s talent or experience.

  The son of a successful mining engineer from Lyon, Puvis was expected to pursue his father’s career.23 However, a trip to Italy in the 1840s altered his thinking, and he returned to France determined to become a painter. He studied under Eugène Delacroix, Thomas Couture and Henri Scheffer, but quickly realised that he was more comfortable working alone. And when he did so, he started to excel. Puvis made his Salon debut in 1850 and reappeared there in 1859 after a series of rejections. By the 1860s, he had settled comfortably into producing the epic decorative work that was to become his trademark. By the time he met Marie-Clémentine, Puvis had made his name producing vast, often allegorical compositions (frequently murals), which bore the influence of classical art, and depicted Grecian and antique figures in statuesque poses. His success was due in no small part to his sensitivity to popular tastes and his ability to satisfy a diverse array of ideologies simultaneously. As the French grappled to redefine national identity in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian war and the Commune, Puvis’s carefully planned, meticulously executed compositions appealed to multiple schools of thought. ‘I have great power of evocation,’ he once informed Berthe Morisot, ‘and I often live in the past.’24 Indeed, Puvis could boast that rare achievement of being admired by academics and moderns alike. Zola wrote that Puvis’s art was characterised by ‘reason, passion and will’; the description might just as easily have been applied to the man.25

  While Puvis’s apartment was situated near Pigalle, he disliked interruption when he was working, and so had taken a large studio to the west of the city at Neuilly.26 It was here that Marie-Clémentine unbuttoned her high-collared dress to have her bare skin exposed and her body scrutinised by an older man for the very first time.

  During the winter season (understood to run from September through to the opening of the Salon in May), a good model could expect to work a long day.27 Many were booked for two sittings. The morning began at eight o’clock and ran through until midday. Afternoon sittings started at one o’clock and finished at five. With models rarely allowed more than ten minutes rest from a pose every hour, Marie-Clémentine soon realised that she had embarked on a physically gruelling profession. There was no such thing as a school for modelling; a girl learned on the job, and the lessons could be harsh. Marie-Clémentine gradually began to understand the expectations, and the protocol to adopt if she wished to please her employer.

  Puvis’s studio was vast and airy – suffocating in the summer, its bitter contrast in the winter.28 But the good model would know better than to ask for more coal.29 She must be punctual and able to hold the desired pose for as long as necessary, and without appearing fatigued or needing continual reminders and corrections. A successful model was creative and bright, and worked in collaboration with, not against, the authoritative presence of the artist. It was not a role in which Marie-Clémentine was inherently comfortable. But once she stepped through the doors of the Neuilly studio, the secret world she discovered was awe-inspiring. Dazed by the novelty, she complied with all Puvis’s demands.

  Models posed either for parts (the head, a clothed torso, for example), or, more controversially, for l’ensemble – the full (often nude) figure. The girls who offered this service earned more but fell victim to the very harshest social opprobrium. In a society which prized female propriety, accepting money in exchange for one’s naked body seemed the ultimate sin. For girls who succumbed to such an act would be inspected not only by the professional eye of the artist; they would be explored by the untrained gaze of the Parisian public.30 Models for l’ensemble were thus widely agreed to be sexually available, a common mid-19th century perception that George du Maurier reflected in his novel Trilby (1894). When a mother learns that her son is in love with an artist’s model, she enquires: ‘A model […]? What sort of model – there are models and models, of course […] A model for the figure?’ A reply to the affirmative incites the reaction: ‘Oh, my God! my God! my God!’31

  But Marie-Clémentine had inherited a peasant’s stoicism regarding the human body. She harboure
d a curiosity in its form rather than a self-conscious embarrassment over its social implications. She had no scruples about exposing her own body, no concern when it came to society’s opinion.

  In the early 1880s, Puvis had been commissioned to decorate the monumental staircase in the Palais des Arts in Lyon.32 His giant The Sacred Grove of the Arts and Muses (1884) was consequently one of the first works Marie-Clémentine sat for. Painters seldom found their ideal beauty in a single model, and so were often obliged to take features from several different models and attempt to merge them into a seamless – flawless – whole. Likewise, one model could provide material for several figures and accordingly, a number of the characters in The Sacred Grove, male and female, borrowed parts of Marie-Clémentine. With her restrictive clothing shed and her hair released to come tumbling down her back, Marie-Clémentine provided Puvis with just the human material he needed to compose his cast for the ethereal scene he had envisaged in The Sacred Grove.33

  Puvis could be stubborn when he had fixed his mind on something, ‘as difficult as a plough to set in motion,’ Berthe Morisot observed.34 But once he had begun a piece he felt passionately about, the artist worked methodically. At such times he was fond of routine. As soon as Marie-Clémentine had taken her pose, he set to work. The artist worked steadily in silent concentration, inhaling on his pipe from time to time, while Marie-Clémentine was left to ponder her surroundings. With its high ceilings, the quiet studio was elegant and refined, qualities new to Marie-Clémentine, while all around the workspace, ladders, brushes and canvases were carefully arranged. Puvis abhorred disorder and was, in character, quite a different breed from the bohemian artists Marie-Clémentine had seen lounging around café tables in Montmartre. Marie-Clémentine absorbed everything she saw.

  A creature of habit, Puvis worked carefully until lunchtime when he and Marie-Clémentine would stop to revive themselves on bread and fruit, and the sitting would resume in the afternoon. On one occasion, Puvis required a second figure, and Marie-Clémentine suggested an older model she knew. And then there were the occasional visits of the Princess Marie Cantacuzène, a Romanian noblewoman who, despite her marriage, had continued a love affair with Puvis for more than twenty years.35 The eldest child of Prince Nicolas Cantacuzène, the Princess was a slender, sad-looking woman in her sixties by the time Marie-Clémentine made her acquaintance. She had a pallid, oval face with small yet intense brown eyes. Graceful and dignified, her grey, centre-parted hair was scraped back off her face severely, and her entire persona exuded an air of melancholy. She had first met Puvis in the 1850s, before Marie-Clémentine was even born, in the studio of the painter Théodore Chassériau.36 Theirs was a chivalrous, elegant relationship for all its illicit nature. Throughout their extended courtship, Puvis showered her with gifts, letters and flowers. The Princess was, in appearance, age, background and demeanour the very opposite of Marie-Clémentine. Her whole, regal person was an object of intense curiosity and fascination for the spirited young model and daughter of a pauper. Whenever the Princess arrived, the silence in the studio was broken and the sitting abruptly ceased.

  But most of the time, the painter and his model were alone.

  While models in private ateliers escaped the ritual teasing inflicted on girls by merciless male students at teaching ateliers, the enforced intimacy between painter and model increased the potential for erotic encounters.37 With Marie-Clémentine regularly baring her nubile young body before the older painter, rumours that Puvis had given in to temptation and taken his young model to be his lover were inevitable. Like so many outwardly decorous pillars of society, Puvis was the subject of a lewder portrait among Paris’s gossips. Incidents of lecherous behaviour, quite the antithesis of the gentleman presented, had been recounted. Soon, stories about the artist and the girl young enough to be his granddaughter were being whispered around Montmartre.38 It was said that Puvis took Marie-Clémentine to restaurants and plays; she had moved out of the apartment she shared with her mother and was living with him in sin; he had given her a little pearl ring. Someone even said Marie-Clémentine had been heard to drop his name into conversation and casually refer to him as her lover.

  The extent of their physical relationship remained a matter of conjecture. But when gossip and a star-struck teenager’s careless chatter with peers were laid aside, there remained a spiritual chasm between model and painter which could never be bridged. Even when, at the end of each day, Puvis paternally accompanied his charge on foot on the long walk back to Pigalle, they drew tantalisingly close but failed to connect. As they walked through the twilit streets, Marie-Clémentine remembered: ‘He was as charming as could be. He talked and talked, quietly, slowly, but constantly, chatting about this or that. He was as curious as a woman. I listened to him, walking close by without uttering a word. Besides, I would not have known what to say. I was so impressed with him. I would never have dared admit to him that I had been trying to draw.’39

  Unbeknown to her employer, Marie-Clémentine was using her sittings at Neuilly to train herself, not just in how to be a model, but in how to be an artist. Quietly, but attentively, Marie-Clémentine watched and absorbed every detail; from the artist’s way of working, the mixing and handling of paints, the ordering of a composition, to the public relations of the business, including preparing for exhibitions and negotiating with dealers. Nothing escaped her attention.

  Artists usually kept a log, however crude, with the names of models they could use on future projects. Eugène Delacroix’s address book served as a useful aide memoire whenever the painter needed a model: ‘Mme Carbon, 44, Rue Fontaine-Saint-Georges; elegant model, quite tall, good with drapery. Mme Eléonore, 40, Rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette; very pretty model, little Venus.’40 The 19th-century art scene was a close-knit community; everyone knew (or at least knew of) everyone else, even if they were not formally acquainted. Painters often passed on the name of a good model when she was not being used. Although Puvis was a ponderous worker when absorbed with a commission, he did not need full days from Marie-Clémentine for all of that time. And as Marie-Clémentine was blossoming into a woman, others were starting to notice how enticing she was too. Plump and radiant with good health, her brilliant blue eyes sparkled whenever she smiled, which was often.41 She was light-hearted and seductive, sometimes cheeky, always spirited. Then when her long, golden-brown hair was released and fell loose, cascading over her shoulders down to her waist, she looked the very image of country vitality. Added to which, she was now acclimatised to the demands of the profession, comfortable with exposing her body and expert at holding a pose. Living in Montmartre, the heart of Paris’s art community, and with Puvis’s name on her résumé, Marie-Clémentine soon established an enviable modelling career.

  She sat gazing wistfully for hours so that Prix de Rome winner Jean-Jacques Henner could create his painting Melancholy, and even the artist had to compliment her on her physical stamina and mature approach to the sittings.42 The painter, caricaturist, illustrator and graphic artist Jean-Louis Forain, a good friend of Degas, employed her. She posed for Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen, as well as the Italian Giuseppe de Nittis, the American painter Cornelius Howland and even the Emperor’s cousin, Princesse Mathilde, who hosted an acclaimed painting and literature salon. One day, Marie-Clémentine was ‘Truth’ in the Czech artist Vojtĕch Hynais’s Truth Emerging from the Well (c. 1880–1890). The next, she was a siren clinging to a sailor in Gustav Wertheimer’s The Kiss of the Siren (1882).43 Every time, Marie-Clémentine was created afresh. Each new environment demanded a different identity, and like an actress, she changed herself accordingly. It therefore seemed only natural that she should alter her name to something more manageable for the artists now employing her. So from the 1880s, Marie-Clémentine became the more convenient – the more Italianate, exotic and sacred – Maria. She had always lived for the present and adapted herself to circumstance. At last, she had found a profession in which she truly excelled.

  Maria’s job
was engrossing, but the efforts required to maintain a modelling profile were immense. After long periods sitting, standing or reclining, motionless and in silence, trying not to shiver, or else struggling to bear sweltering heat, her teenage vitality remained repressed and unspent. To return home to the cramped apartment and her ageing mother after such a day was too much. For to Maria, it seemed as though Madeleine, now in her fifties but appearing older, merely grumbled continuously about her own sorry lot and the monotony of her cleaning work. Maria longed for some release. Fortunately, she was now mixing in circles with people who craved the same. And they could show her just where to go to satisfy that urge.

  CHAPTER 5

  Dancing in the City

  Quand lo jorn es tròp cort, fau li apondre la nuech.

  (When the day is too short, you have to add the night.)

  OLD LIMOUSIN PROVERB1

  For an unconventional, creatively minded teen in search of fun, there were few grounds more fertile in which to blossom than Montmartre. If the entertainment industry was thriving and democratising across Paris in the last quarter of the century, Montmartre boasted the particularity that it catered primarily to – and attracted, in droves – Paris’s working classes and artistic types, all the while retaining its unique ambience of casual rustic charm. The mood was relaxed, the drinks cheap and the people as diverse and interesting as could be found anywhere in Paris.