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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Ruth Butler's Hidden in the Shadow of the Master: The Model-Wives of Cézanne, Monet and Rodin in NYT

Author Gives Voice to Artists’ Silent Muses, Their Wives
By PATRICIA COHEN
New York Times, September 3, 2008

Years ago Ruth Butler was walking through the Musée Rodin in Paris when she glimpsed a small oil painting of a woman with short brown hair, intense eyes and pursed lips. It was labeled a portrait of Rodin’s mother.

“I said, ‘That’s ridiculous,’ ” recalled Ms. Butler, who was on the museum’s board and is now professor emerita at the University of Massachusetts in Boston and the author of a Rodin biography. She recognized the portrait as that of Rose Beuret, Rodin’s model and later his wife.

“I thought that if even the Musée Rodin doesn’t care about Rose, then I should write about this,” Ms. Butler said as she sat sipping a cappuccino in the Petrie Court at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, gazing out at Central Park.

The book is “Hidden in the Shadow of the Master: The Model-Wives of Cézanne, Monet and Rodin,” recently published by Yale University Press. In it Ms. Butler tries to rescue from obscurity the women who she argues were so much a part of the triumphs of these visionaries.

“These artists would find people whose body and face make a statement that they could not otherwise make,” Ms. Butler said, arguing that the models have never been given their due. The women “made a contribution,” she added. “They deserve to be seen, not just visually but biographically.”

As artists in the second half of the 19th century shifted from painting historical, mythological and religious subjects to everyday life, they looked for a new kind of model. For the first time, Ms. Butler said, artists used the same model — often a wife or lover — over and over and over again in different paintings and in different scenes.

The switch was related in part to the end of official patronage, which centuries of artists had depended upon for support. The collapse of this system of sponsorship and the beginnings of an art market set off a series of changes for artists, not the least of which was often poverty.

The three artists that Ms. Butler focuses on — Auguste Rodin, Claude Monet and Paul Cézanne — all spotted their models on the streets of Paris, drawn to something unique in a face or manner. All later married and had sons. But the women were often treated badly.

Ms. Butler “provides good reason to look at these artists’ work again,” a reviewer in the British magazine The Spectator wrote, because “each look brings a lost soul back to life.”

Very little is known about Hortense Fiquet, Cézanne’s model and wife, who sat for 27 oil portraits and numerous drawings. Ms. Butler said she tried to get information from their descendants, but they either snubbed or misled her. The feeling in the family, she said, was that Hortense “was a lowlife, that she spent his money.”

“They didn’t like her,” she added.

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Ruth Butler's HIDDEN IN THE SHADOW OF THE MASTER in PW Online

Web Exclusive Reviews: Week of 7/28/2008
-- Publishers Weekly, 7/28/2008

Hidden in the Shadow of the Master: The Model-Wives of Cezanne, Monet, and Rodin
Ruth Butler. Yale Univ., $32.50 (368p) ISBN 9780300126242

Had they been literate, any of this book’s three subjects—wives to the founders of French Impressionism—could have penned fascinating memoirs; as professor and author Butler (Rodin: The Shape of Genius) explains in her introduction, “we know almost nothing in a direct way from Hortense, Camille, or Rose,” and that therefore her book “depends both on fact and imagination.” Providing a sketch of their lives, Butler takes readers to Paris during the Franco-Prussian War, where the women lived on extremely limited means, married to men whose only true love was their art. Hortense Fiquet and Camille Doncieux, the wives of Cezanne and Monet respectively, modeled for some of the artists’ most well-known paintings and bore their first children, yet receive little mention in most biographies. Rose Beuret is more well-known, but only because Rodin was slightly more open about their relationship. Beuret acted as Rodin’s model and his assistant, and watched over a studio “full of sculpture” in his absence, “mostly works of clay needing constant attention.” Looking beyond their work, Butler considers the human side of these artistic giants through the foggy lens of their most dedicated subjects. (June)

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Ruth Butler's HIDDEN IN THE SHADOW OF THE MASTER in the Boston Globe

Married to the Masters

By Jan Gardner, June 22, 2008
Boston Globe

Paul Cezanne, Claude Monet, and Auguste Rodin were among a generation of French artists who turned away from traditional subjects such as the Bible and painted scenes from everyday life. In doing so, they immortalized their wives: the regal figure of Cezanne's wife, Hortense Fiquet, perched on a red armchair; a playful Camille Doncieux - Monet's wife - in a kimono, fan in hand; the troubled visage of Rodin's wife, Rose Beuret.

In a new book, "Hidden in the Shadow of the Master: The Model-Wives of Cezanne, Monet, & Rodin" (Yale University), art historian Ruth Butler reports that the women's lives were "difficult and lonely - more unhappy than not." Each woman met her husband-to-be on the streets of Paris when he asked her to model for him. Each bore him a son before marriage. Money was a struggle for all three couples early on, and the challenges of living with a striving genius never ended, according to Butler, professor emerita at UMass-Boston.

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