Suzanne Valadon, from very inauspicious beginnings, worked her way determinedly and passionately to great success and recognition as a woman artist of enormous courage and great skill especially in drawing. She achieved all this at a time when women of humble birth were simply never accepted in the artistic worlds of late 19th-early 20th century Paris. She came from hard-working, stoic Limousin stock, as she depicted in this portrait of her mother.