Renoir's Dancer

by Catherine Hewitt

  Incredibly, Bruant’s fashionable patrons loved it. For many, to be insulted to their faces was a revelation. It gave a real taste of the legendary Montmartre lowlife. It was quite the thing.

  Lautrec thought Bruant’s bedside manner terrifically funny and immediately became one of the regulars, often arriving with Maria in tow.

  Maria and Lautrec got along famously, and with their individual reputations for promiscuity and wild living, it was naturally assumed that they were lovers. Their behaviour had given firm proof that neither automatically took love-making to imply spiritual attachment. ‘He chased me,’ Maria confided years later.54 Lautrec’s friends were convinced that he was infatuated with her, and Gauzi defensively maintained that she led him on.55 Intimately acquainted with Lautrec’s personal affairs, Gauzi was also privy to the fiery rows between the painter and his muse. Maria was ‘capricious’ Gauzi accused, and would fail to arrive for sittings, sometimes disappearing for days at a time with no explanation.56 She had told Lautrec that she had a two-year-old son, but she could just as easily have been off on some folly for all he knew. An unreliable model made completing canvases an infuriating business.

  ‘My dear Mama,’ Lautrec wrote in the spring of 1886. ‘My tonsillar troubles are ended, but my model is threatening to leave me. What a rotten business painting is. If she doesn’t respond to my ultimatum the only thing I can do is bang out a few illustrations and join you in August.’57

  Though now a mother, Maria was still wilful. She danced to no one’s tune but her own.

  It seemed probable that Lautrec would be able to keep better track of her movements when a generous allowance from his family in the second half of 1886 enabled him to lease a studio on the fourth floor of the building in the Rue Tourlaque where the Valadon family lived.58 But it was not to be.

  Gauzi too had an attic studio in the building and one morning he was startled by knocking at his door. It was Lautrec.59

  ‘Maria has gone!’ he exclaimed. ‘She hasn’t been home for three days and her mother doesn’t know where she is [. …] Forain asked me for a model. I sent her along – he might have kept her for himself.’

  ‘Well? Any news of Maria?’ Gauzi inquired a few days later.

  ‘She has come back! […] She never set foot at Forain’s. She told me some tall story; she’s got plenty of imagination, and lies don’t cost anything.’

  But there was more binding Lautrec to Maria than her function as a model and her role as a drinking companion. Finally, one day, he discovered her artistic talent. Lautrec was rich, skilled and well-connected in the avant-garde art world. And when he saw Maria’s drawing, he was stunned. He had to show somebody.

  ‘Look at that drawing,’ Lautrec enthused to Gauzi. ‘Isn’t it good?’60

  Gauzi examined a fine profile portrait of a little boy.61 The infant could not have been more than two or three, but the confident handling of the red chalk, the crisp outline of his profile, the delicate, wispy strokes of his hair, gave the child an indisputable character.

  ‘Not bad,’ Gauzi remarked. ‘There’s delicacy in the line, and sensitivity in the vision. Who did it?’

  Lautrec’s eyes sparkled when something excited him.62

  ‘Maria,’ he said.

  CHAPTER 7

  Talent Laid Bare

  Ton vesin t’ajudará si lo sabes apelar.

  (Your neighbour will help you if you know how to attract his attention.)

  OLD LIMOUSIN PROVERB1

  ‘The weather has turned quite inclement,’ announced Le Figaro on the morning of 23 September 1886 – Maria’s 21st birthday.2 The sky above Paris was grey and overcast, the temperature had dropped and throughout the day, persistent showers drizzled down on pedestrians as they hurried along the reflective macadam. And there was worse on its way; forecasters predicted violent storms to come thundering in from North America and hit the French coast in the next few days.

  Maria often suffered with coughs and colds when the weather turned at the end of the year.3 However, with Madeleine’s Limousin home remedies to soothe her body and a host of events to occupy her mind, her birthday that year was a time to look forward.

  Lautrec had lately formed a friendship with a fascinating new addition to Cormon’s atelier, a student with whom Maria immediately empathised. Hollow-cheeked and pale, with intense blue eyes and a shock of red hair, Vincent, as the newcomer insisted on being called, was the son of a Dutch Protestant minister, and he fittingly took himself and his art with reverent seriousness. He had arrived in Paris unannounced in March to join his brother Theo van Gogh, who was an art dealer. Theo obligingly took his older brother in. When Vincent appeared for his first day at Cormon’s a few months later, the other students soon realised that he was different.

  At 33, he was older than most of them. He worshipped Delacroix; the subject of colour aroused in him a passionate reaction; and any artistic theory which ran counter to his own views was liable to provoke a fierce response.4 ‘It is as if two people dwelt within him,’ Theo explained, ‘one of them marvellously talented, refined and tender, the other selfish and hardhearted! They appear alternately.’5 His intensity and volatility unnerved many of Cormon’s students, who judged it wisest to leave him alone.6 But the day he first seized a paintbrush, they could not help but watch in astonishment. He painted frantically, furiously, with bold, brightly coloured sweeps of his brush – as though his life depended on it. His classmates were stunned. It was the very antithesis of the academic style they were being taught to follow. Lautrec’s interest was immediately piqued.

  And Lautrec was not the only student of Cormon’s to take notice when an alternative approach was presented. Vincent had arrived just as dissent was reaching fever pitch at the atelier, and his avant-garde style won him at least two other admirers.

  Four years older than Lautrec, Louis Anquetin, the son of a Normandy butcher, had arrived in Paris in the early 1880s determined to become a painter.7 Tall and sturdy with a long face and a crooked nose, Anquetin was an undeniably good painter. Even Cormon prophesied a brilliant career for him However, Anquetin was no more inclined to kowtow to the rigid conventions of academic art that Cormon preached than Lautrec. Innovative in his artwork, he discarded new painting styles nearly as quickly as he picked them up and by the 1880s, he was applying his experiments with colour to modern Parisian scenes. Lautrec had immediately warmed to Anquetin. Besides their enthusiasm for art, their shared love of horses provided ample source of conversation. With a confidence that bordered on self-importance, Anquetin was the unofficial leader of the little group that now frequented Bruant’s where Maria and Lautrec drank.

  Eighteen-year-old Émile Bernard was the baby of that group.8 With the slender physique and fine features of a boy, tousled brown hair and a rebellious nature, Bernard had come to Paris from Lille and joined Cormon’s atelier a little after Lautrec. Lautrec and Anquetin soon took him under their wings and introduced him to the works of the great masters in the Louvre, as well as the more modern canvases of the Impressionists. Wide-eyed and hungry to indulge on Paris’s feast of visual offerings, the teenager embraced the new with all the enthusiasm of youth, devouring theories and experimenting alternately with Impressionism, Pointillism, and later Cloisonnism and Pictorial Symbolism. But for all his love of novelty, the activity of Montmartre’s seedier side horrified him. Like Van Gogh, Bernard was deeply religious and took his art extremely seriously. In fact, so firmly did he hold a view once he had settled on it that he was eventually expelled from Cormon’s for insubordinate behaviour. As he remembered it, it was when he paid a call on his former classmates that he first met Van Gogh. Despite the age gap, the pair formed a firm friendship, one based on mutual respect.

  Now whenever Maria accompanied Lautrec on one of his evenings out in Montmartre, one or several of these artists was sure to be there.

  Sometimes the young men shared ideas around a café table, or else they would stroll along to the shop of Julien ‘Père’ Tanguy
, the colour merchant, in the Rue Clauzel.9 Parisian artists held diverse, often conflicting views on many matters, but on one thing there was universal agreement: the former Communard Père Tanguy was kindness itself. Overwhelmingly generous, calm and serene, Père Tanguy supported struggling artists, gave them credit and allowed the back rooms of his little shop to become at once an informal meeting place and a repository where works could be exhibited and viewed.10 For Lautrec and his friends, the greatest boon was that it was one of the few places in Paris they could marvel at the work of Cézanne at leisure. Each man came away inspired, his enthusiasm rekindled, with an urgent desire to pursue his own creative vision.

  Van Gogh was particularly anxious to promote the work of himself and his friends. Why not mount an exhibition?, he enthused.11 He had already organised an exhibition of Japanese prints at the Café du Tambourin in the spring of 1887. Now he thought of the Restaurant du Chalet on the Avenue de Clichy where he often ate and which had superb lighting. He could get his new friend Paul Gauguin to join them.12 They could be the ‘Petit Boulevard Group’ (in answer to the Impressionists, widely thought of as the ‘Grand Boulevard Group’). The others agreed, but none threw himself into the venture more wholeheartedly than Van Gogh. It opened in November 1887, but did little to further Van Gogh’s artistic reputation.13

  Maria watched the Dutchman with sympathy, and Lautrec’s renowned parties afforded her an even closer acquaintance.

  Lautrec was a party host extraordinaire and his weekly ‘at homes’ and dinners were legendary. The prospect of being left alone with only his thoughts terrified him. He consequently ‘freely invited people’, so that on many occasions, his ‘studio was so cluttered with visitors […] that there was nowhere to sit.’14 If it was a dinner he was hosting, a guest could be sure to have their taste buds excited by a gastronomic orgy of the finest delicacies in Paris, while their mind would be stretched and inspired by the most profound debates. For Lautrec, food was an art form as sacred as painting. He was a fearless amateur chef, and he and his childhood friend Maurice Joyant delighted in concocting recipes together which would be generously bestowed on those select friends they deemed worthy of their culinary masterpieces – and oddities. Few who had tasted it could forget Lautrec’s chocolate mayonnaise or his port with garlic, which he swore to be an infallible cure for bronchitis.15 And whether a studio party or a formal dinner, Lautrec took abstinence as a personal affront.16 He even went so far as to tip goldfish into the carafes of water to dissuade guests from leaving him to drink alone. The American craze for cocktails delighted him, and he perfected the art of mixing them.17 Friends were invariably presented with a potent glass of brightly coloured liquid; often these were experiments, carried off with varying degrees of success and served with a chuckle.

  An incorrigible bachelor, Lautrec was pleased to have Maria as his unofficial hostess at these gatherings. So it was that she came to witness Van Gogh’s integration into the world of the Parisian artists.

  Born into the claustrophobic environment of a profoundly religious Dutch family, Van Gogh’s life thus far had been a tumultuous chain of false career starts, failed love affairs and ill-health. He had worked variously as an art dealer, a missionary and had even trained as a minister. The one constant was his deep conviction in the importance of art and his quest for painterly satisfaction. ‘I long most of all to learn how to produce those very inaccuracies,’ he wrote the year before he came to Paris, ‘those very aberrations, reworkings, transformations of reality, as may turn it into, well – a lie if you like – but truer than the literal truth.’18 His approach struck a chord with Maria.

  She watched as, every week, Van Gogh arrived at Lautrec’s struggling under the weight of his latest canvas.19 As the room hummed with conversation, he would set the piece on an easel in the corner, and wait expectantly for someone to comment. Everyone ignored him. He scrutinised the faces around him in earnest, hoping to spot a reaction which could be interpreted as a critique. Nothing came. Eventually, he would resign himself to his colleagues’ indifference and leave, his canvas under his arm, dejection inscribed on his face. And yet he would always return the following week and the performance would be repeated. ‘Painters are brutes,’ Maria spat after she had witnessed the scene replayed countless times.20

  But however his guests behaved, Lautrec’s cheerful front seemed ironclad. He was a firm believer in the power of humour and practical jokes to lighten a mood.

  In March 1887, he moved into an apartment with his friend, the medical student Henri Bourges, whose faithful housemaid Léontine saw to the men’s every need.21

  One night, Lautrec invited Maria over for supper, and when conversation began to dwindle as Léontine was clearing the first course, Lautrec, as usual, started to look elsewhere for entertainment.

  ‘Undress,’ he urged Maria, as soon as the servant had left the room. ‘Strip yourself naked, and we’ll watch Léontine’s face.’22

  Stifling her giggles, Maria did exactly as he said, retaining only her shoes and stockings. Then she sat down primly on the edge of her seat. Once she and Lautrec had summoned sober expressions, Lautrec rang the bell for dessert. When Léontine arrived, she gave a start. Then composing herself, she continued to serve the rest of the meal as though nothing were amiss. Not a word was uttered – until the following day.

  It was then that Bourges came to Lautrec, furious. Léontine had been to see him. Monsieur had ‘failed’ her, she exclaimed. A good, honest woman like herself deserved some respect.

  ‘You conducted yourself indecently,’ fumed Bourges. ‘In front of servants, one keeps oneself in check […] Undress your models in your studio to your heart’s content, but at table, leave them with something on! If you persist in your jokes, Léontine will leave us and then where will you be!’

  Lautrec appeared aghast. ‘Léontine is wrong to believe herself offended,’ he protested. ‘I had no intention of outraging her morals – Maria was the only one naked […] I was dressed, and the only thing I took off was my hat.’

  But Lautrec could see that his flatmate was far from sharing his amusement at the incident.

  ‘Léontine knows very well what shape a woman is underneath,’ he grumbled.

  The episode was just one of many of Lautrec’s practical jokes in which Maria participated. He found her marvellously good fun. And the fact remained that when she was in the mood to work, she was an extremely versatile model.

  In 1887, Lautrec began Poudre de Riz. The canvas showed a face-on depiction of Maria as a demi-mondaine seated behind a table, the eponymous powder pot by her side. With her pale, wiry arms folded in front of her, she fixed the viewer in the eye, her expression disdainful yet resigned, her face drawn in a near-scowl. Though presented as a woman of loose morals, her appearance, like the table in front of her, paradoxically put up a barrier to intimacy. Thus cast, Maria was at once available yet untouchable. The role was fitting.

  As Lautrec was all too aware, Maria was no more likely to show loyalty to a single painter than a demi-mondaine was to show affection to just one man. Nor did she feel the slightest obligation to tell Lautrec how she spent her days when she was not modelling for him. She had posed for Zando’s At the Café de la Nouvelle Athènes in 1885, and had given a remarkably convincing impression of a young woman thoroughly enjoying herself in a man’s company with an array of beverages in front of her. More particularly, Maria’s relationship with Renoir was far from resolved. It was difficult to ignore the resemblance between Maria and many of the major figure subjects Renoir tackled between 1884 and 1887. There was The Large Bathers (1884–1887), but also Woman with a Fan (1886) and Young Woman with a Swan (1886).23 And then in 1887, Renoir painted Maria in one of his most suggestive interpretations yet: The Plait.

  Curvaceous and healthy, looking much younger than her twenty years, Maria sat plaiting her long, now brunette locks in a lush green garden. Her simple, peasant-like outfit scarcely contained her shapely form and exposed her naked arm
s, while her bodice could barely hold her firm young breasts. The work, an example of Renoir’s so-termed ‘Ingres’ period, seemed to exude natural vitality, unlike Lautrec’s painting, which blatantly exploited artifice.24 And yet, as Maria later recalled, ‘I was caked in make-up.’25 Renoir openly conceded that the model was merely a starting point, that his brush could mould her to fit a painting and satisfy his bourgeois viewer – and ultimately, himself. ‘The painting must not smell too strongly of the model,’ he warned. ‘But at the same time, you must get the feeling of nature. A painting is not a verbatim record […] The most important thing is for it to remain painting.’26

  From Zando to Renoir, and from Hynais to Lautrec – though now in her twenties and a mother, Maria’s identity was no less protean, no less transitory, than it had ever been. Each artist saw in her what he wanted, but she belonged to no one. And Lautrec was not the only male pained by the realisation that he must share her.

  Every day, waiting for her return at the apartment in the Rue Tourlaque, was a little boy desperate to see his mother.

  In 1888, Maurice turned five. His first few years had shown Madeleine and Maria that he was not going to be an easy child.27 He was tiny, skinny even, and the dark shadows under his deep brown eyes gave him a haunted appearance. His nerves seemed as delicate as his fragile body. People might see him cowering fearfully behind his grandmother’s skirts in the streets. But he could just as easily erupt into a furious tantrum, often without warning or obvious cause. It took all Madeleine’s ingenuity to calm him down again.

  People whispered that Madeleine was weak, that she should use a firmer hand with the boy. But Maurice would have presented an arduous challenge for any woman, let alone one nearing 60. Still, it was impossible not to sympathise with the child; he knew no father and as the main breadwinner, his mother, his only parent, was seldom at home. Most of the time, Madeleine had to deal with his fits alone.