By PATRICIA COHEN

Years ago Ruth Butler was walking through the Musee 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 Musee Rodin doesn’t care about Rose, then I should write about this,” Ms. Butler said while at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
The book is “Hidden in the Shadow of the Master: The Model-Wives of Cezanne, 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. “They deserve to be seen, not just visually but biographically.”
The three artists that Ms. Butler focuses on - Auguste Rodin, Claude Monet and Paul Cezanne - 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.
Very little is known about Hortense Fiquet, Cezanne’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 the feeling in the family, she said, was that Hortense “was a lowlife, that she spent his money.”
In the Met, two large portraits of Hortense Fiquet are hung. On the right is “Madame Cezanne (Hortense Fiquet, 1850-1922) in the Conservatory,’’ from 1891. “She’s extremely beautiful,” Ms. Butler says. “Her body is full, round and powerful.
A few feet away is “Madame Cezanne in a Red Dress.” It is dated 1888-90, but Ms. Butler says it is almost certainly later than that, pointing to the radical change in style. “Her body is flattened out and off-kilter,’’Ms. Butler notes. “It’s more abstract, angular.”
This is the last portrait Cezanne did of Hortense. They were living apart, Ms. Butler says, she in Paris, he in Aix. “My conclusion is that she said, ‘Well, I’m going to retire now.’”
In another room is a painting that was once titled “Camille Monet on a Garden Bench” but is now labeled “The Bench” (1873), an example of how these women have been erased from history, Ms. Butler says.
The picture was done when the Monets were living in Argenteuil, outside Paris, and were enjoying a flash of financial security.
“Monet and Camille were a wonderful working couple,” Ms. Butler says. “She just loved to pose.”
She mentions an 1876 painting, “La Japonaise,” in which Camille is wearing a blond wig and dressed in a flowing red kimono. “They were having fun,” Ms. Butler says. She was part of it.”
Her happiness was not to last. Soon after, Ms. Butler says, she became sick and the couple ran out of money. Camille died in 1888.
The Met’s collection of Rodins, which the artist personally helped select when the museum opened a gallery devoted to his work in 1912, is the best in America, Ms. Butler notes. Behind a glass case is a small mask of Rose Beuret from about 1880, the only one of her in the collection. She is 36; her eyes are cast down, one brow is slanted, the other curved like a tilde, on the tip of her nose is a smudge.
Although Hortense Fiquet was bewildered by Cezanne’s work, Rose Beuret and Camille Doncieux were very much partners, Ms. Butler says.
“Rodin and Rose worked together for 15 years,” she says.
She ran the atelier before his commission for the “Gates of Hell” in 1880, after which he largely pushed her aside.
Ms. Butler said that in the end, all the women suffered greatly . Hortense Fiquet was nicknamed “la boule’’ (connoting a ball and chain), while Rodin didn’t marry Rose Beuret until the couple were in their 70s and she was near death.
Still, Ms. Butler wonders: “Would Rose have preferred to live with a railroad worker who came home for dinner every night- Would Camille have preferred to be married to a department store owner who would give her all the dresses she wanted?
“Probably not,” she answers. “They knew they played a role and they were very proud of their work.



Ruth Butler, right, wrote a book about women who inspired artists. “La Japonaise’’ (1876), Claude Monet’s portrait of his wife, Camille, top. An 1891 painting of Hortense Fiquet, Cezanne’s wife.