Welcome to the history tricks, where any resemblance to a boring old history lesson is purely coincidental.

And here's your 30-second summary.

Suzanne Valadon was born on the wrong side of the tracks and the wrong side of the blanket,

who grew up to be one of the it girls of the impressionist era.

She traveled a unique journey to stardom by parlaying her career as an artist's model for the biggest names in France into an artistic career of her own.

The end.

Hello and welcome to the show.

It's just me, Beckett, today, as Susan is on her annual family holiday to the East Coast.

Let's talk about Suzanne Valadon. But first, let's drop her into history. In 1894, Coca-Cola is sold in bottles for the first time.

The International Olympic Committee is founded at the Sorbonne in Paris to plan the

first modern Olympic Games that were held two years later in Athens, Greece. The Tower Bridge

in London opens for traffic. A fire at the site of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago

destroyed most of the remaining buildings.

And the wedding of Nicholas II of Russia and Alex of Hesse in the Grand Church of the Winter

Palace at St. Petersburg. For more on them, you should listen to our Romanov sisters episode.

Born this year, Norman Rockwell, Martha Graham, King Edward the Eighth of Great Britain,

who we on the show know as Mr. Wallace Simpson, poet E. Cummings, and singer Bessie Smith,

died this year, Adolf Sachs, inventor of the saxophone, poet Christina Rossetti,

Mary Jane Patterson, the first African-American woman to receive a BA degree,

and author Robert Louis Stevenson, who, among other things, wrote the strange case of Dr.

Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. And in 1894, a poor untutored artist named Suzanne Valadon made her

breakthrough into legitimacy during a major exhibition in Paris.

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