The book illuminates the social web at the heart of the Paris art scene, focusing on the camaraderie that developed between Valadon and artists Toulouse Lautrec and Edgar Degas, which led her to model for Renoir (she is immortalized in the Dance at Bougival)… Hewitt persuasively casts Valadon as a pragmatist adept at navigating her public and private lives, resolving Maurice’s uncertain paternity in 1891, then marrying businessman Paul Mousis and exhibiting internationally soon thereafter… The cast of world-class artists and the stories of their romantic entanglements combine to produce a book that reads like an opera libretto revolving around a pioneering spirit who bristled at the limiting label of “woman artist.”
