Renoir's Dancer

by Catherine Hewitt

  However, even with Maria’s wages from modelling, with only one family member earning, the household income would be radically reduced. Housing and feeding three mouths would leave little money to spare – certainly not enough to afford a move to bigger premises in one of the sparkling new apartment buildings near the centre of Montmartre. And yet mysteriously, that is precisely what the family did.

  Zandomeneghi had lately moved to an imposing property on the corner of the steep Rue Tourlaque, which intersected with the Rue Caulaincourt where Maria had gone to school. Ever loyal to his model friend, Zando managed to negotiate three first-floor rooms for the Valadon family. By the time they moved in, the building had become home to a number of artists besides Zando, and so the atmosphere was closer to a bohemian student residence than a standard apartment; it was as though it was designed expressly to Maria’s tastes. The Valadons’ living quarters were brighter and infinitely more spacious and conducive to work than their previous home. But that Maria could never have afforded it herself was indisputable.

  Montmartre’s gossips concluded that the apartment must have been paid for by one – or perhaps even several – of Maria’s lovers. Miguel Utrillo or Puvis de Chavannes seemed the most likely candidates. Miguel and Maria kept up an active correspondence during his travels abroad; away from Paris and with his honour intact, it seemed entirely plausible that Miguel could improve his finances and send the proceeds back to Maria discreetly.

  But many, even those closest to Maria, believed Puvis to be the secret benefactor. Years later, an official document from that period was reportedly found in which Puvis promised Maria a regular maintenance allowance – an odd contract to make if he were not her child’s father.20 The condemnatory evidence was conveniently destroyed, but the theory of Puvis’s paternity was sufficiently convincing and widely held for his great-nephew to feel the need to publicly deny the connection, on the grounds that the artist left no legacy to Maria and ‘his son’ in his will.21

  However, the apartment was funded, the year 1884 marked the start of a new chapter for Maria, which saw her modelling by day, socialising by night and returning to the apartment in between to find Madeleine engrossed in raising her grandson, drawing on the aeons-old Limousin country wisdom she had gleaned during her youth.

  It was an exhilarating time to be involved in the art world, in any capacity. At last, individualism was encouraged, not condemned. By the 1880s, Impressionism was yesterday’s news. Artists had already gone beyond it, and were experimenting with new forms, content and techniques. Diversity was the modus vivendi. Accordingly, 1880s Paris became the birthplace of some radically different movements, including Divisionism, Symbolism, Synthesism and Nabis. Furthermore, the proliferation of alternative exhibiting bodies offered real grounds for hope for avant-garde painters and those hailing from the fringes of society. The Salon was no longer the sole and hazardous rite of passage lying between a painter and success. There were now other organisations where reputations could be forged, such as the Société des Aquarellistes Français. But by far the most notable and innovative artistic venture in 1884 was the Salon des Artistes Indépendants.

  When his technically daring composition Bathers at Asnières (1884) was rejected by the jury of the 1884 Salon, former pupil of the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts Georges Seurat was spurred to retaliate. Joining forces with a number of other disgruntled painters, among them Symbolist Odilon Redon and self-taught artist Albert Dubois-Pillet, Seurat helped found the Groupe des Artistes Indépendants.22 With Redon acting as chairman, the group proposed to do something unprecedented: they would mount a show whose organisers were not answerable to any official institution, and where there would be no prizes and, significantly, no jury.23 The venture introduced a radically new concept onto the Parisian art scene: freedom. The first exhibition, the Salon des Artistes Indépendants, was held from May to July in a temporary building in the Jardin des Tuileries near the Louvre. To critic Jules Claretie’s surprise, the ‘sub Salon, or side Salon, or Salon margin’ was ‘neither laughable nor ridiculous’. ‘There are many works which would have honoured the Champs Elysées’ exhibition,’ he exclaimed, perceptively adding: ‘You will find more than one young talent who, in years to come, might just be famous.’24

  Times were changing and Maria was uniquely placed to take advantage of the opportunities now being created. Her modelling career had already proliferated her image across the globe. Now, every night at the Prague National Theatre, audiences were graced with Maria’s presence, as the new curtain designed by Hynais and for which Maria had posed, descended to reveal her winged, seminaked body hovering above a dramatic allegorical scene. Meanwhile, Renoir was hard at work on his vast painting, The Large Bathers (1884–1887), painstakingly sketching, reworking and perfecting a voluptuous Maria as she reclined naked to treat viewers to the sight of her radiant skin, firm breasts and sun-kissed hair. But of all Maria’s dramatic incarnations, one of the most talked about at that year’s Salon was undoubtedly Puvis de Chavannes’s The Sacred Grove of the Arts and Muses (1884).

  Le Figaro’s reporter was enraptured. Puvis was ‘an inspired artist’, the figures for which Maria had posed ‘interpreted by a poet’, the landscape ‘a pure masterpiece of construction, finesse and poetry’.25 In short, the work was ‘hands down, the best piece in the Salon’.

  But not everyone shared the reviewer’s opinion. Hobbling through the echoing halls of the Salon that year, a bowler hat on his head, a cane in one hand, peering at the artworks through his pince-nez, was a diminutive art student by the name of Henri-Marie-Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec-Monfa.26

  Lautrec was different from the majority of students sent to browse the Salon walls. He was of noble birth. The first son of Count Alphonse and Comtesse Adèle de Toulouse-Lautrec Monfa, whose union as first cousins continued the ancient ancestral union of the counts of Toulouse and the viscounts of Lautrec, Henri was part of a magnificent aristocratic dynasty.27

  He spent the first eight years of his life near Albi in the Tarn. As a boy, he showed an exceptional talent for drawing, and when his father decided on a move to Paris, family friend and painter of animals René Princeteau coached him before encouraging him to train further.28 Having first been accepted to study under the revered portrait artist Léon Bonnat, Lautrec joined his classmates in soliciting the tutorship of the estimable painter of biblical and pre-historical scenes Fernand Cormon when Bonnat was elected to teach at the École des Beaux-Arts.29

  Now, in the public mindset, the quintessential modern artist came from humble origins and struggled to appease his gnawing hunger on stale bread and broth; Lautrec was brought up on a rolling estate, where riding and hawking were a gentleman’s preferred pastimes and meals were flamboyant, multi-course spectacles of gastronomic decadence. His father was a fearless horseman and an incorrigible eccentric who delighted in dressing up and was inclined to stray from his marital bed. Meanwhile, his mother was a mild, sweet-tempered creature in whose eyes little Henri could do no wrong. Lautrec’s childhood had conditioned him to female tenderness, male eccentricity and good living. He gave little thought to money; he did not need to.

  Then in addition to his noble heritage, Lautrec was eloquent (despite a marked lisp), witty and charming, and undeniably charismatic. But, also unlike many of his peers, he was, by his own definition, a monster.

  Though in the prime of life at twenty, he was the height of a child. His torso was more or less normal in size, but an undiagnosed osteo-related condition had arrested the growth of his limbs and made his bones unusually friable.30 The startling effect was that of a full-grown man’s chest balanced precariously on the legs of a child who was, paradoxically, crippled with age. He waddled as he walked, gripping his cane with short, fat fingers. And the irregularity with which his different body parts had grown seemed even to have affected his facial features. His head was reasonably proportioned for his shoulders, but his nose was uncommonly broad. Lips too enormous and plump for his fac
e caused him to drool as he spoke and impeded his speech, making him roll his ‘r’s.31 Beneath his stubbly black beard and moustache, his chin was rounded and upturned like a baby’s. By his twenties, Lautrec had grown used to the reaction he typically incited in others: stomach-churning disgust.

  But one physical feature redeemed him a little of his unpleasantness. His dark brown eyes were arresting in their beauty. They seemed to laugh when he spoke, betraying his quick mind and enthusiasm for life.32

  And that joie de vivre was contagious enough to make those who knew him entirely forget his physical shortcomings. Even as a child, Lautrec had demonstrated an eccentric streak and an affected manner of speaking far beyond his years. As an adult, it ripened into a brilliant sense of humour based on the same stringent powers of observation that pervaded his drawing. He could bring a whole room to tears. ‘He had a gift for getting on with people and all his fellow students liked him,’ remembered his close friend, the painter François Gauzi.33 ‘He never had a harsh word for anyone and never tried to be funny at someone else’s expense; he made fun of himself, and fun of the next man with the point of his pencil.’34

  His clowning and self-deprecation was at once his best defence and a mask to which he clung. Maintaining it was a full-time occupation, for atelier students showed little mercy where physical difference was concerned. But by his twenties, Lautrec was well-practised in the art of affecting a cheerful disposition. When he fell off a chair and fractured his left leg at the age of thirteen (an unusually consequential injury, since his weak bones refused to knit together afterwards), Lautrec never once complained, even when it meant that he could not partake in the outdoor activities he enjoyed with his cousins.35 When he fractured the right leg the following year after falling into a ditch, his response was just as placid. He did not shed a tear, but simply sat clutching his leg while his mother ran off frantically in search of help.36 ‘I hope you won’t fret too much about my case,’ he implored his godmother, ‘because a clumsy fellow like me just isn’t worth it.’37 Though the consequence and not the cause of his condition, the injuries marked a turning point after which he would always feel the need to defend himself against the label he most abhorred: cripple. Few would have seen in his eyes anything besides merriment, but Gauzi remembered: ‘I have known them to be desperately sad.’38

  By 1884, Lautrec was one of Montmartre’s most patriotic residents, an enthusiast of all that the 18th arrondissement had to offer. An inherently social creature, he was enthralled to discover the area’s vibrant nightlife. A spectacle himself, Lautrec eagerly sought out the more spectacular and the strange. He was delighted when he happened upon a man even shorter than himself, a dwarf named Gustave de Fontanelle, with whom he would always stop and chat when they passed in the street.39 Montmartre’s bars, cabarets and the circus fed his hunger for the extraordinary. He had no need to limit himself on financial grounds either. One characteristically jovial letter to his mother in which he detailed his current expenses ended simply: ‘P.S. Send money.’40

  Part of the area’s attraction was that, for all its sloping terrain, every entertainment was close at hand; he could not walk far or for long. So by the time Puvis’s epic painting of Maria was shown at the 1884 Salon, Lautrec’s days were spent working – and joking – with his fellow students at Cormon’s, and his nights supping on the full array of Montmartre’s delectable pleasures.

  Puvis’s great work had divided opinion at Cormon’s atelier.41 Lautrec sided with those who found it ridiculous, the colour insipid and the composition facile. Consequently, for two hysterical afternoons, the students at Cormon’s were taken up creating a visual parody of the medal-winning canvas. The muses became popular personalities from Montmartre’s cabarets, well-known singers or actresses, and Lautrec even painted himself in, next to a companion who showed his backside to the ladies. When it was complete, a chuckling Lautrec signed it on behalf of everyone and mounted it in his studio.

  Maria and Cormon’s jester went to all the same bars, knew the same people and embraced the thrill of Montmartre’s social scene with the same fervent gusto; that Lautrec should encounter his own, real-life muse was practically inevitable. Whether or not their paths had already crossed at Le Chat Noir or another of their shared haunts of choice, as Gauzi remembered it, it was Zando who took Maria to formally meet Lautrec for the first time when he was struggling to find a model.42

  Lautrec was immediately smitten. With her circus training, Maria was fascinating to him. He loved the circus, having gone regularly to the Cirque Fernando with Princeteau when he first arrived in Paris.43 The colour, the noise, the lights, the adrenaline, the physical dexterity of the performers – he loved it all, it was everything he wished his life could be. And besides Maria’s association with that spectacular world, Lautrec adored women, for all he knew that he likely repelled them. He had a pronounced sex drive and – one of the happier anomalies of his irregular growth rate – more than ample means of satisfying it when the opportunity arose. Many a girl around Montmartre giggled knowingly when he compared himself to ‘a coffee pot with a big spout’ on account of this asset.44 Along with alcohol and art, women were one of his favourite weaknesses; he demanded no further compensation for the hand fate had dealt him. And Maria was unusually beautiful, and there was a strength to her beauty, something he would never possess. She also spoke her mind, a quality he always admired. The crowning glory was that, at only 1.54m tall, Maria was nearly as short as he was.

  For her part, Maria was never one to be fazed by an extraordinary physique. She knew the torment when bodily encumbrance frustrated creative dreams. And once she set foot in Lautrec’s studio, with its dust and its clutter and, among other bric-a-brac, its parody of the painting by Puvis that she knew so well nailed crudely to the wall, it was clear that she had found a kindred spirit.45 Lautrec’s humour was electric, he seemed permanently excited by life. At last, she had met a painter for whom art was not imperious and stale but vital and energised. It was refreshing.

  The more sittings she attended, the closer their acquaintance became. The class gap seemed irrelevant.

  Lautrec had in mind an enormous painting of a circus equestrienne on horseback, he told her.46 She would be preparing to jump through a hoop that a clown held ready. The practical complications of working on such a large scale when he was himself so small bothered Lautrec not at all; he simply clambered up a nine-foot ladder. Such determined chutzpah for the sake of art was just to Maria’s taste.

  Artists could behave abominably towards their models, but Lautrec treated Maria with the utmost respect. He enjoyed nothing more than lively conversation and sharing delicious refreshments. He also urged her to borrow any of his books that she pleased; Maria’s literary knowledge expanded. Through Lautrec, she even came across the contemporary, avant-garde poetry of many of Le Chat Noir’s regulars, like Maurice Rollinat.47

  Sittings usually took place in the afternoon when Lautrec had finished working at Cormon’s. He often painted in his studio, but if the painting demanded it and the weather permitted, he would take his model outside. He had become acquainted with an elderly photographer, Père Forêt, who owned a little-used plot of land at the bottom of the Rue Caulaincourt.48 Forêt gave Lautrec permission to paint there. With its brambles and long grass, it was a barely cultivated little wilderness, and mostly quiet. A small summer house proved an ideal place to keep his equipment, along with a selection of bottles, for as Lautrec would solemnly say: ‘One should drink little, of course, but often!’49

  For one painting, Lautrec decided that he wanted Maria to be wearing an elaborate hat. The cost being of little consequence, he scoured all the best milliners in Paris. Finally, he settled on an extravagant, tall and winged ‘butterfly’ hat, whose sharp lines he mirrored by making Maria’s face appear more angular and her expression stern.

  When the day’s sitting was over, Maria often found herself, not returning to Madeleine and Maurice but persuaded to accompany Lautrec
on one of his wild jollies to Le Chat Noir or another such drinking den and being proudly introduced to his many friends. And in the year that Lautrec painted Maria in the butterfly hat, there was a brilliant new haunt to patronise.

  At midnight on Wednesday 10 June 1885, Rodolphe Salis, dressed in a third-class préfet’s uniform, left Le Chat Noir in a noisy and ostentatious torch-lit procession to the sound of beating drums, with a crowd of curious customers and friends following close behind.50 The Boulevard de Rochechouart premises had become too small, he boasted; Le Chat Noir was to move to a bigger venue on the Rue de Laval.51 The new cabaret would be even better, Salis assured his customers. And as for their favourite aspects, they would hardly notice the difference. As it happened, drinkers would still be able to enjoy the ambience of the smaller venue: a few days later, the abandoned cabaret reopened as Le Mirliton – and its founder was none other than Salis’s own star performer, the magnetic singer Aristide Bruant.

  Salis had every reason to feel anxious. Like the Pied Piper of Hamlin, wherever Bruant led, crowds were sure to follow. Lautrec and Maria were among them.

  What the place lacked in furniture after Salis’s dramatic exit, Bruant made up for in personality. He strode up and down in his felt hat, boots and cape, addressing each drinker in turn. And in counterpoint to Salis’s excessive flattery, Bruant gave his venue a unique twist: he systematically insulted customers.

  ‘Here’s something fancy coming,’ the singer would holler. ‘Something choice, three star tarts. And the gentlemen following behind are undoubtedly pimps or ambassadors! This way, ladies, this way! Sit beside the little fat fellow here!’52 Or else: ‘Here you, fatty, place your fat carcass next to Madame. And you, you long sausage, put your skeleton between these fools who are laughing like a couple of idiots at God knows what!’53