Ruth Butler has set herself an ambitious and commendable task in "Hidden in the Shadow of the Master," namely, to pluck from oblivion the histories of three women who shared the lives of three remarkable artists - Monet, Rodin, and Cezanne - sometimes happily and sometimes in utter misery. Butler asks good questions: Why have these women never figured in traditional biographies of these artists? Did they feel cast aside in their own time, as their husbands pursued extramarital affairs and devoted, almost always, more attention to matters of art than of family? Did their roles as the principle models for their husbands' figurative work constitute an important contribution to art history?

Unfortunately, Butler isn't really in much of a position to answer these questions. Researching the lives of obscure people is undoubtedly very difficult: to pull off her project successfully, Butler would have needed to get extremely lucky in uncovering previously unknown documents, like correspondence and diaries - as, for instance, Gail Levinson did in researching the life of Edward Hopper's wife, Jo, who is brought vividly and poignantly to life in Levinson's "Edward Hopper." Butler however has not hit upon many revelatory documents, and one tends to doubt that she tried very hard to find any. Ninety-five percent of the sources she cites are war-horses of the traditional history of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art, which she creatively reinterprets to place the "model-wives" front and center. The result is a lot of rhetorical questions: "What must Madame Cezanne have felt like" in her difficult marital circumstances, etc.

The first sign of trouble comes in Butler's introduction where she says, "The story I tell depends both on fact and on imagination." To my mind, that statement makes this book a very suspect addition to the academic literature, and I am frankly surprised that Yale University Press would have published it. Most disturbing, to fill in the gaping blanks in her narrative, Butler engages in highly speculative biographical interpretations of paintings and sculptures - often presuming to intuit the feelings of both sitter and artist. This is precisely the sort of thing that one would expect of undergraduates writing on art for the first time, and one would caution them against it because of the methodological speciousness of the approach.

In sum, high-minded intentions cannot make up for a lack of rigorous research and ground-breaking discoveries. Despite Butler's best efforts, all three of the women about whom she writes in "Hidden in the Shadow of the Master" remain, as far as I can see, unrevealed in this very ambitious though questionable book.

This book was very informative about the way these artists lived and treated their wives. It showed the very human side to Cezanne, Monet, and Rodin and made me think that genius comes with a price. Their wives/models didn't have easy lives living with them which was in a way surprising to me after seeing all the beautiful portraits they did of their wives. Those portraits made me fantasize about how wonderful it must have been to be married to these artists. This book opened me up to reality!

It was a sad revelation to see how these brilliant artists treated their models who became their mistresses, the mothers of their children, and they eventually married them,--but gave them little credit.

It was also a sad revelation how little they were appreciated and how little their art was able to reap for them financially.