Although she could not afford formal art classes, Valadon learned from the painters around her who included Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec and Renoir. Her work is colourful and bold, and while there are clear similarities with her contemporaries' paintings, she developed her own distinctive style. This is La Chambre bleue (1923, Centre Pompidou) of which it has been said that she "evokes Matisse and then pulls out the rug, conjuring a traditional theme only to disrupt it with jarring modern intrusions.'