Fernande Olivier, (her given name Amélie Lang) was born June 1881. She was the product of a young girl and a married man. At the age of two, Amélie was orphaned to an uncaring Aunt of her father's relation, where she lived until the Aunt tried to arrange a marriage for her with an older accountant. Disagreeing with this decision, Amélie ran away, at the age of 18, and married a physically and sexually abusive man, Paul Percheron. The marriage was short-lived. In April 1900, at the age of 19, Amélie ran away again, never bothering to get divorced. Fearing her husband might one day find her, Amélie Lang changed her name to Fernande Olivier.

Fernande Olivier modeled for artists and sculptors for five years from the period of 1900-1905. The artists she modeled for are listed below, along with the type of art they created. According to her own memoirs, Fernande Olivier never posed or modeled for any photographer or Academie nude study books.

In 1905 Fernande moved in with Picasso. He demanded she give up modeling for others. Picasso was known as a very private, mysterious, somewhat eccentric person. La Belle Fernande was Pablo Picasso's first true love. When the subject was La Belle Fernande modeling for others, Picasso became highly jealous, often locking her the their apartment when he left. Sometimes she was left for days. From the years 1906-1912 Fernande never modeled except for Picasso.

After their split in 1912, the now 32 year-old, Fernande, had difficulty surviving. She did not have the means to support herself in the manner to which she and Picasso had become accustomed. Over the years Fernande tried her hand at countless jobs; assisting an antique dealer, looking after children, working as a cashier in a butcher's shop, running a cabaret, reciting poetry at the Lapin Agile, and reading horoscopes but she always fell back to giving lessons in drawing and teaching French dictation.

In 1927, Fernande Olivier, in an effort to earn enough money to survive, made the decision to publish the memoirs of her life with Picasso. Although she could not find a publisher, in 1930, Fernande managed to have her story serialized in the evening newspaper, Le Soir. This outraged the, now famous, Pablo Picasso. If having his private life, for the first time, on public display, wasn't bad enough, his activities in illicit drugs, mistresses, and involvement in thefts from the Louvre, was more than he could handle. Six issues were published before Picasso and his lawyers prevailed.

Fernande wrote Picasso several times during the 1940's asking for financial assistance but to no avail. In 1956, at the age of 70, Fernande, now bedridden with arthritis and deafness, arranged through Marcelle Braque that Picasso would give her a sum of one million francs to never publish her original manuscripts during their lives. Every month for the rest of her life, Picasso paid Fernande a small pension. The memoirs were not published until 1988 long after they both were dead.

Artists Fernande Olivier posed for: