The invisible muses

Philippa Stockley on the new book by Ruth Butler 

Hortense Fiquet, Camille Doncieux, Rose Beuret. Who are they? The wives of Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet and Auguste Rodin.The third is the best known; the others have largely been omitted from history. Demonstrably, in Fiquet’s case. Cézanne’s first biographer, Georges Rivière, was Fiquet’s daughter-in-law’s father. Rivière wrote the biography while she was alive, yet did not mention her once.

Without the women that these three artists, born mid-19th century, took up with when young, whom they later married (Rodin in old age), many of the paintings or sculptures that made them famous could not have been created.

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Rose Beuret acted as Rodin’s hands-on studio technician, as a curt, business-like letter from him proves, as well as model for, notably, ‘Genius of Liberty’, a bellicose flying figure done for La Défense. All three appear repeatedly in paintings. In Monet’s case, a large picture of Camille Doncieux, exhibited as Camille but later renamed ‘Woman in a Green Dress’ (by which title he himself then referred to it), made his name. It is one of many paintings in which she features, not always as wife, sometimes as a character, a persona — in ‘La Japonaise’ of 1876, wearing a blonde wig. There are 27 known paintings of Fiquet by Cézanne; like Monet, he paints her both ‘straight’ and in character.

In Hidden in the Shadow of the Master, the historian Ruth Butler presents a well-researched account of these, the unpaid models on whom their lovers built their fame: so visible to us now, once we are shown where to look, so invisible, so crudely or cruelly treated during their lifetime. It is a disturbing tale, made more so by being in triplicate. It is full of darkness, which Butler patiently lights, coaxing the women back from practically unmarked graves, revealing the scorn or jealousy heaped on them by their husbands’ friends.