She had a series of jobs that included working in a milliner's workshop, at a factory making funeral wreaths, selling vegetables, and as a waitress.

Valadon frequented the bars and taverns of Paris with her fellow painters and she was Toulouse-Lautrec's subject in his oil painting The Hangover.

[17] Valadon was an acclaimed painter of her time, well-respected and championed by contemporaries such as Edgar Degas and Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

[20] Her work attracted attention partly because, by painting unidealized nudes, she upset the social norms of the time that had been created by male artists.

[22] In 1895, the art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel exhibited a group of twelve etchings by Valadon that show women in various stages of their toilettes.

[25] Notably, Degas was the first person to purchase drawings from her,[26] and he introduced her to other collectors, including Paul Durand-Ruel and Ambroise Vollard.

[28] Her first large oils for the Salon related to sexual pleasures and they were some of the first examples in modern painting with a man being an object of desire by a woman similar to that idealized treatment of women by male artists.

[30] Valadon was well known during her lifetime, especially toward the end of her career, in the 1920s more specifically, as she helped to transform the female nude that depicted expression through a woman's experience.

Valadon's painting of an acrobat, L' Acrobate ou La Roue, sold in 2017 for £75,000 by Christie's Auction House.

[1] Valadon's self-portraits, portraits, nudes, landscapes, and still lifes remain detached from trends and contemporaneous aspects of academic art.

[36] The subjects of Valadon's paintings often reinvent the old master themes: women bathing, reclining nudes, and interior scenes.

Art historian Patricia Mathews suggests that Valadon's working-class status and experience as a model influenced her intimate, familiar observation of these women and their bodies.

In this respect she differed from Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt, who painted mostly women, but "remained well within the bounds of propriety in their subject matter" because of their upper-middle-class status in French society.

[14] Later, Valadon's friend Miquel Utrillo signed papers recognizing Maurice as his son, although the true paternity was never disclosed.

[41] In 1893, Valadon began a short-lived affair with composer Erik Satie, moving to a room next to his on the Rue Cortot.

Satie became obsessed with her, calling her his Biqui, writing impassioned notes about "her whole being, lovely eyes, gentle hands, and tiny feet".

Suzanne Valadon died of a stroke[45] on 7 April 1938, at the age of 72, and was buried in Division 13 of the Cimetière de Saint-Ouen, Paris.

After her death in 1938 As one of the best documented French artists of the early twentieth century, Valadon's body of work has been of great interest to feminist art historians,[71][better source needed] especially given her focus on the female form.

Her work was candid and occasionally awkward, often characterized by strong lines, and her resistance to both academic and avant-garde conventions for representing the female nude have encouraged interest in her work: It has been argued that many of her images of women signal a form of resistance to some of the dominant representations of female sexuality in early twentieth-century Western art.

At the top of the funicular, and less than 50 meters to its east, are the steps named rue Maurice Utrillo after her son the artist.

[75] Several have speculated Valadon was the basis for the character Suzanne Rouvier in the W. Somerset Maugham's 1944 novel The Razor's Edge.