Ruth Butler's HIDDEN IN THE SHADOW OF THE MASTER in The Wilson Quarterly

Married to the Muse
Kate Christensen
The Wilson Quarterly, Autumn 2008

The library of art history is rife with biographies of The ­Artist—­whomever he might ­be—­as a young, ­middle-­aged, old, and immortal man. But rarely does a book deal primarily with the woman he painted over and over, the ordin­ary ­model-­wife whose face an artist immortalized in paint or bronze. Rarer still is the book that focuses on three such women and reveals them as biographical subjects in their own ­right.

Hidden in the Shadow of the Master is Ruth Butler’s masterfully researched examination of the lives of Hortense Fiquet, Camille Doncieux, and Rose Beuret, the three women who mod­eled for, bore sons to, lived in poverty with, and eventually married three of the towering artistic geniuses of their time: Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet, and Auguste Rodin, respec­tively. All were ordinary girls plucked from the streets of Paris by their future husbands, ­hand­picked, apparently, with an eye toward muse­dom. Though they figure prominently in their husbands’ paintings and sculptures, beyond these evocations of their changing expressions, modes of dress, settings, and periods of life, little of substance was known about any of them before ­now.

Butler argues convincingly that her subjects are impor­tant to the history of art, and not for their faces and figures alone. At the turn of the 20th century, traditional artistic subjects, taken from myth, the Bible, and history, were giving way to a more quotidian, social, realistic mode. That Cézanne, Monet, and Rodin chose as their models the women they lived with was a revolutionary shift: The domestic and aes­thetic became connected in an entirely new way. “These women,” Butler writes, “weren’t just models; they brought a whole spectrum of feelings with them, giving their husbands’ art emotional texture and substance, contributing elements for art as im­portant as the light in which a scene is bathed, the space where an object sits, or movements that provide real character in a scene or to a figure.”

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