Jacqueline Marval was the pseudonym for Marie Josephine Vallet, a French painter, lithographer, and sculptor. She was born October 19, 1866, in Quaix-en-Chartreuse into a family of schoolteachers.
Vallet's first works were rejected from the 1900 Salon des Indépendants, but she succeeded in having a dozen paintings shown in that exhibition the following year, under the pseudonym of Jacqueline Marval. The art dealer Ambroise Vollard bought them all.
In 1902, several of her paintings were displayed alongside works by Flandrin, Albert Marquet, and Henri Matisse in a gallery in Rue Victor-Massé curated by Berthe Weill, who was particularly interested in promoting the works of female artists living in Paris.
In 1913, Francis Picabia displayed Marval's 1903 painting The Odalisques in the Armory Show, an important exhibition of modern art in New York. This painting depicted five women: three seated nude, one dressed and reclining on her elbow, and one standing and holding a tray. Guillaume Apollinaire wrote of this painting in the Chronique des arts that "Mme. Marval has given the measure of her talent and has achieved a work of importance for modern painting.' The same painting was displayed at the July 1916 Salon d'Antin organized by the poet André Salmon, beside Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.
Marval's works began to be recognized across Europe; she exhibited in Basel, Barcelona, Oslo, the Venice Biennale, Winterthur, and Zurich. However, she lost interest in painting fairly quickly. she preferred to dance, dress as a "précieuse ridicule", dying her hair red and wearing green hats which she made herself. She was given the epithet "the fairy of the Belle Époque."
Stylistically, “Marval’s paintings are provocative and edgy, challenging and unusual, she was an important modernist at the earliest moments of the movement.”