WHILE THE SHORTAGE of colour illustration and inconsistencies in referencing are disappointing aspects of this book, it is nonetheless a very compelling narrative, writes Vera Ryan.
Butler sees the later 19th century, when contemporary life was replacing literary and mythological themes as subject in painting, as the first time when a large number of artists "identified their chosen model and their chosen woman as one and the same". Using letters and memoirs among other sources, Butler draws her reader into a well-contextualised account of the lives of three women, who all bore sons soon after their initial meetings with the artists for whom they modelled and who later married them.
Sometime in the late 1860s in Paris, Hortense Fiquet's oval face touched the heart of Cézanne, who came to see Nature in terms of the cylinder, the sphere and the cone. Twenty-seven of the 180 portraits he painted were of a usually discreetly well-dressed Hortense. Few allow much character reading. Sittings for him were typically lengthy, numerous and controlled. "Do I have to tell you that you must sit like an apple?" he fumed at his weary dealer, Vollard. Shortly after Hortense and Cézanne married in 1886, Cézanne's father died and money worries eased. Hortense's unusually sullen gaze in the 1890/92 portrait formerly in the collection of Henry McIlhenny of Glenveagh does not suggest that happiness followed.
Cézanne was regarded by some contemporaries as fearful of women. Increasingly, he did not like being touched. Before he met Hortense, he painted The Rape and other dark images of violent sexuality. Art history attributes his breakthrough to working outdoors, with Pissarro, which began soon after Cézanne and Hortense's son Paul jnr was born in 1872. Cézanne referred to Hortense as La Boule, the Ball [and chain] though he did not live with her the whole time. Butler is seamless in her integration of the expansion of Paris and the changing travel opportunities made possible through the development of the railroads. In 1878, Cézanne's father read a letter from Victor Chocquet, sitter and collector of Cézanne , to Cézanne, in which Choquet asked after Hortense and Paul jnr, thus revealing their existence. Asking after Hortense was unusual. Zola did not do it in his letters. Zola was generous to the couple up to 1886, when L'Oeuvre (The Masterpiece), based on Cézanne's struggles as an artist, offended the painter. Butler persuasively uses L'Oeuvre to illuminate all three artists' lives. One of the two surviving letters from Hortense is to Mme Chocquet, who, unlike Cézanne's family and some later scholars, was not disdainful of her. Butler finds a confident, gregarious Hortense in the letter. Others remembered her as extraordinarily patient. But little is known and the jigsaw is inevitably shaped by the wider context. Butler harnesses a lifetime in art history to do this very well, convincing this reader that Hortense's role in Cézannes development was fundamental.
CAMILLE DONCIEUX, born in 1847, had a flair for fashion which thrilled Monet. Post-war scholarship confirmed that she was modelling for him by 1865. In 1867, their son Jean was born. "The mother has nothing to eat," wrote Monet, who later destroyed Camille's letters. Much is revealed about the couple's life through Monet's correspondence with the artist Frédéric Bazille who was killed in the Franco-Prussian war in 1870, the year Monet married Camille. The parents' dire poverty is not evident in Jean Monet in His Cradle (1867). The baby's finery was paid for by Comte Beguin Billecocq, whose journal was recently researched. There was a time, in Argenteuil, when sunlit images of a beautifully dressed, leisurely Camille reflect a truth. Butler describes the pressures artists were under as the crippling power of the Salon continued and dealers sought alternative ways of selling work. Pitched at the market for things Japanese, Camille's blonde wig in La Japonaise (1877) reflects the Monets' effort to ride the market. By the following year she was fatally ill. The Monets had by now joined households with the Hoschedé family - important former patrons of Monet - and Alice Hoschedé, whom Monet later married, nursed Camille. Camille Monet's sad story is movingly told.
Butler is an authority on Rodin, who, like Monet, was born in 1840. If Camille's style reflects the consumption of fashion, Rose Beuret's story is that of a worker in the industry. Butler's achievement is to bring the reader to admire and feel for Rose, who has been overshadowed perhaps by the tragic figure of sculptor Camille Claudel, the lovely young assistant to Rodin with whom he had an affair. Rose was not only Rodin's model, but also his studio assistant, continuing for many years to apply the wet rags that prevented his clay figures from drying out. Their son Auguste jnr was born in 1866, in an institution where single girls could give birth free of charge. Rodin's career took priority over Auguste Beuret's rearing. The further up the social ladder artistic success brought Rodin, the more Rose was left behind. The change in tone from early amorous letters to his chilly missives from the 1880s onwards mirrors this. Rose was semi-literate, as the author and the illustration of one of Rose's letters suggest. Rodin was grateful to her but his love affairs and her lack of marital status distressed her deeply. In 1908, Hotel Biron became important in Rodin's life, eventually becoming the museum of his - and Claudel's - work. It was the state negotiations to make the museum happen that led to Rodin's enforced parting with another paramour, Claire de Choiseul, and marriage to the 73-year-old Rose in 1917.
EVEN THOUGH THEIR stories are fairly classic, Prof Butler's thoughtful, well-researched book brings these women out of their masters' shadows and makes one much more aware of their creativity and endurance. Classic art history grew out of Vasari's Lives of the Artists (1568). Scholarship like Butler's leads us to important knowledge of wives of the artists, if only to deepen our knowledge about the conditions in which geniuses make their work. Butler also confirms the generous support so many artists gave one another at a time when bourgeois fathers like Monet's and Cezanne's sought to control their sons by withholding it.
Vera Ryan lectures in art history at the Crawford College of Art and Design, CIT, Cork. Her last book, Dan Donovan: An Everyman's Life, was published by The Collins Press earlier this year
Hidden in the Shadow of the Master: The Model-Wives of Cézanne, Monet Rodin By Ruth Butler Yale University Press, 254pp. £18.99