Author: Marta Molnar

Historical Fiction Author Marta Molnar is the author of the dual-timeline women's fiction novel THE SECRET LIFE OF SUNFLOWERS about Vincent van Gogh's inspirational sister-in-law Johanna Bonger. Marta is an avid art history enthusiast and a self-taught artist. She studied writing at Seton Hill University and Harvard University, lived around the world, then settled down in the Northeast United States where she currently writes in her version of Monet's garden. (The Secret Life of Marta Molnar: Marta is also the USA Today and New York Times bestselling author of over sixty novels of suspense, romance, and epic fantasy under the pen name Dana Marton. Writing as Dana Marton, she's the recipient of the Rita Award, the Daphne du Maurier Award of Excellence, and was a quarter finalist for the BookLife Prize.)

Renoir’s Muse: The Model who Learned from the Masters while They Painted Her

Suzanne Valadon was born into poverty, a fatherless bastard in Paris, at a time when legitimacy desperately mattered. She started working at age 11 and was a horse walker, a milliner’s assistant, a worker at a funeral wreath factory, and a waitress, until at age 15, she was finally hired by her dream job to be a circus acrobat.

Unfortunately, her circus career ended after just one year, when she fell from the trapeze and broke her back.

She always loved art. She watched the artists of Montmartre and drew her own pictures as a child. After her accident, with few other choices left to her, she became a model for some of the top artists of the time, including Toulouse-Lautrec and Renoir. She had no money for art school, but she watched them as they worked, and she learned.

While she was still a teenager, Renoir seduced her, and she gave birth to her son Maurice at 18. Later, Spanish artist Miguel Utrillo adopted the boy, but paternity was never confirmed, and many people suspected the father might have been Renoir.

Steadfastly working on her technique and style, Suzanne became a popular artist in her own right. She was so good that Degas became her friend and mentor. He thought highly enough of her to purchase her works. She partied with Vincent van Gogh and all the best of the best. (Wouldn’t you love to have been a fly on that wall?)

Not only did she paint, but she taught her troubled son as well, and he grew up to be a famous artist himself. (She managed his career.)

When she died at age 72, Picasso was at her funeral.

So why did I write about her? Because when she died, literally at the easel, her obituary in Le Figaro announced it as “the death of the wife of painter André Utter and mother of painter Maurice Utrillo.” They couldn’t acknowledge that she was also an artist in her own right.

And she was GOOD. She approached painting women completely differently from the male artists of the time.

And she was famous and celebrated and successful, more so than most of her male contemporaries.

How successful was she? In 1923, she purchased the Château de Saint-Bernard, a medieval 14th-century fortress north of Lyon, complete with a drawbridge and a moat. She bought a luxury car (back when nobody had a car) to travel between her castle and Montmartre. She was a woman who lived on her own terms and made it.

So, no, we are not going to let history erase her!

 

If you’d like to find out more about her, try:

https://museedemontmartre.fr/en/musee-jardins/ (They preserved her studio.)

https://www.artbasel.com/stories/suzanne-valadon-centre-pompidou-19th-century-women-artist?lang=en (Art Basel’s introduction of her.)

Or read:

Girl Braiding Her Hair by Marta Molnar https://www.amazon.com/Girl-Braiding-Hair-Light-Life/dp/1940627656

The Valadon Drama by John Storm https://www.amazon.com/Valadon-Drama-Life-Suzanne/dp/177323837X

Renoir’s Dancer by Catherine Hewitt https://www.amazon.com/Renoirs-Dancer-Secret-Suzanne-Valadon-ebook/dp/B074DYB11H/

 

She Survived the Titanic, and It Was the Least of Her Adventures

Helen Churchill Candee was another one of those remarkable women forgotten by history. Once I discovered her, I wanted everyone to meet her.

After her abusive husband ran off, leaving her with two small children, Helen supported her family by writing magazine articles. Desperate for the divorce that New York law wouldn’t grant her, in 1895 she traveled with her son and daughter to the more progressive Oklahoma Territory. (New York State didn’t pass its no-fault divorce legislation until 2010(!), making it the 50th and very last state to do so. If you’re having trouble believing this, welcome to the club. I had to go and confirm it from multiple sources, because I kept thinking Google had to be wrong.)

She loved the Wild West so much that she ended up staying several years, writing An Oklahoma Romance, the first novel about Oklahoma, and she even helped Oklahoma to gain statehood. While there, she also wrote another bestseller: How Women May Earn a Living. This was a huge problem for single/divorced/widowed women of a certain social class. They weren’t allowed physical work like factory work or taking in laundry, yet they had to survive somehow, sometimes supporting multiple children, like Helen.

She was nothing if not industrious. After moving back to the East Coast, she became one of the first interior decorators and helped not one but two First Ladies decorate the White House! I’m honestly awed by her. She wrote books but not just any books, bestsellers! She went to Oklahoma but didn’t just stay, she helped it become a state! She became one of the first practitioners of a brand-new profession but not only that, she decorated the White House!

She must have been a fiercely intelligent and self-motivated woman who was never for a moment too scared to try anything new.

On the Titanic (she took the ship back from Europe, where she was on a research trip for yet another book), she broke her ankle when she jumped into the lifeboat. She was in the same boat as the Unsinkable Molly Brown, and they, along with other women, rowed the boat when the men gave up.

She had to walk with a cane for a year, but it didn’t stop her from riding her horse up the Capitol Hill steps to demand the right for women to vote, during the Votes for Women Parade.

In the First World War, Helen worked as a nurse with the Red Cross in Italy and ended up taking care of Ernest Hemingway at one point.

Once the war ended, she journeyed to Japan, China, Indonesia, and Cambodia, rode through the jungles on an elephant called Effie, and of course wrote a couple of bestselling books about her adventures. Angkor the Magnificent is the first major English-language book about the now famous ruins. The French government and the king of Cambodia honored her for her achievements, and in England, King George V and Queen Mary invited her to Buckingham Palace to give them a private reading.

What did this woman not do? You know what I mean? Just off riding elephants and then tea with the Queen of England. How is Helen not in the history books? There should be statues of her!

Oh, and she was also one of the founders of the Society of Woman Geographers. And she was still traveling internationally for National Geographic at age 80.

I really feel like I’m going to have to up my game.

She lived to age 90 and survived a disastrous flood in Oklahoma, the Titanic, the jungles of Southeast Asia, and two World Wars. I’m writing this near the anniversary of her death on August 23, 1949. So join me in offering this remarkable, intrepid woman a toast.

Long may she be remembered!

To find out more about her, please check out my book, RAISING THE TITANIC. Because, of course, I had to write about her. She cannot be forgotten! We’re not going to let that happen, right?

For further reading, I also recommend:

Life’s Decor: A Biography of Helen Churchill Candee by Randy Bryan Bigham

Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture – Candee, Helen Church

https://www.academia.edu/46104455/Angkor_the_Magnificent_Wonder_City_of_Ancient_Cambodia

https://bluecerealeducation.com/blog/helen-churchill-candee-introduction/

The Woman Who Made Vincent van Gogh Famous: Johanna Bonger’s Remarkable Story

I’m somewhat of an art-nut. Painting is my hobby, and I’m always interested in anything that has to do with art. I have never sold a single piece of art in my life, so I tell my husband that I’m neck and neck with Vincent van Gogh in the race, since he only sold one.

He sold The Red Vineyard to Anna Boch (another artist), the sister of his friend Eugene Boch.

I found out all this from a documentary that featured the Impressionists. (They included Vincent, even though, technically, he’s a post-Impressionist.) And then my chin dropped when the presenter said that Vincent’s sister-in-law saved his legacy, and that without her we might not even know about his art. Whaaat? How had my art-nut, nerdy little self never heard about this?

Down the rabbit hole I went with research, discovering that in fact, Theo van Gogh proposed to her after meeting her just twice! (We’ll give this to Theo, he knew a good woman when he saw one.) After they got married in 1889, she moved to Paris with him from Amsterdam.

Theo pretty much financed Vincent’s life, buying his canvases, paints, and even his pouch of tobacco. He believed in his older brother with all his heart. Unfortunately, Vincent was never able to achieve success. He died the year after Theo and Johanna got married. Theo passed away six months after Vincent, leaving Johanna alone with a brand-new baby in Paris, where she barely spoke the language.

Theo inherited Vincent’s art, and when he died so soon after, the hundreds of paintings, drawings, and letters were left to Johanna. Unfortunately, they were worth next to nothing. She had no training or experience in art, but she believed in Theo, and Theo had believed in Vincent. So instead of discarding the paintings before taking the train back to the Netherlands with her son, she took them along to Bussum, where she started running a boardinghouse. And then she spent the rest of her life making sure that Vincent’s talent would not be forgotten.

To introduce Vincent to the world, she published the brothers’ correspondence. She also tirelessly worked to exhibit the paintings, fighting on despite countless rejections and criticism.

“Mrs Van Gogh is a charming little woman, but it irritates me when someone gushes fanatically on a subject she knows nothing about, and although blinded by sentimentality still thinks she is adopting a strictly critical attitude. It is schoolgirlish twaddle, nothing more. […] The work that Mrs Van Gogh would like best is the one that was the most bombastic and sentimental, the one that made her shed the most tears; she forgets that her sorrow is turning Vincent into a god.” Wrote Dutch artist Roland Holst about her in the Museumjournaal.

Source: J. M. Joosten, “Van Gogh publicaties,”
Museumjournaal 15, no. 3 (1970), 157–58.

So you know what Johanna did? She refused to give up! She even translated Vincent and Theo’s letters into English, and travelled to New York to exhibit his work and introduce him to an American audience.

After her death, her son, also named Vincent van Gogh, carried on the work and founded the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

So, obviously, I had to write a book about her. She was an amazing woman history shouldn’t have forgotten.