Renske Mann with the painting after which her book was named

“DON’T move,” the British painter Cyril Mann would command his young new wife Renske as she posed, naked, in the cold of their cramped flat. “Don’t you f***ing move.”

Art history is full of long-suffering wives, but it is not clear whether Renske Mann counts herself among them. Certainly, The Girl in the Green Jumper is haunted by them. Renske can read the “pained expression” in the portraits of Hortense Fiquet, Paul Cézanne’s “unfortunate” wife; she weeps for the sacrifices of William Blake’s wife and “helpmeet” Catherine.

The writer is drawn to these figures because the pain of the muse is a pain Renske herself has suffered: as she learns early on in her marriage to the artist Cyril Mann, “every pose would turn to agony in time”.

The Girl in the Green Jumper is a remarkable book. Lucid in style and episodic in form – reflecting the uneven texture of memory – the text charts Renske’s 20-year marriage to her husband Cyril, the notoriously difficult and self-sabotaging figurative painter.

In his introduction to the book, art critic Mark Hudson credits Cyril with making “genuinely innovative breakthroughs” in his practice and having “the potential to become one of the most important figurative painters of his time”. But he was also “beset by very severe mental problems” with an ability to turn “each moment of promise into bitter disappointment”.

According to Renske, the book evolved from a series of Facebook posts she created recalling her life with her late husband.

“I put up simple pictures with simple explanations, and within weeks people started calling me the ‘Kim Kardashian of the Facebook art groups’,” she told Review.

It wasn’t long before she found a publisher for her work. The couple met at Kingsway Day College in Holborn in 1959, when 48-year-old Cyril was working as an art teacher and Renske was “barely” out of her teens. The book follows their unusual life together, beginning in a small flat in Islington’s Bevin Court.

When they met, Cyril was down on his luck, estranged from his wife, and suffering from ill-health.

Meanwhile, Renske was animated by the certainty that is both the gift and curse of youth, propelled by a feeling it was her “destiny to help him realise his potential as an artist.”

She said: “Just think, I’m a 20-year-old, he’s 50, he gave up his job two months after meeting me. So for some reason, he felt like I felt: we were directed by fate. This was his last chance to go back to art and really flower.

“It was completely unusual – when I married Cyril it was actually unusual for married women to work, never mind about being the main earner in the family. Everybody thought we were completely ridiculous.”

Renske is 83 now, and the book is written with the clarity and good humour afforded by the passage of time.

Cyril, with whom Renske had a daughter, died well over 40 years ago following a catastrophic mental and physical collapse.

In the intervening years, Renske has lived another life entirely, settling with her partner, Marion Mathews.

“For me, after 20 years with Cyril, the thought of having another man was completely out of the question. I needed the affection, the warmth, the friendship and the companionship of another woman,” she explained.

Despite this, the muse-turned-writer looks back on her relationship with clear eyes, avoiding nostalgia or cynicism.

She has a knack for capturing nuance and complexity, painting a picture of a man who was many things at once: both exceptional and mundane, scary and pitiful, controlling and submissive.

It would have been easy for Renske to typecast her husband as the villain. He ranted and raved and spoke to Vincent van Gogh through the night – “Vincent was the third man in our marriage,” Renske said – and demanded his young wife pose for hours on end, until her hands went numb and she was on the edge of sleep.

But Renske assiduously avoids the binary of victim and villain. Instead she charts the dips and flickers of power dynamics played out over the course of their relationship. She traces Cyril’s technical development as an artist, alongside her own journey from ingénue to high-flying public relations executive and family breadwinner.

The painting after which the book is named shows Renske as a self-assured young woman in a vivid green jumper, her arm draped nonchalantly over the arm of a red chair. She stares directly at us with a look of composure.

According to the book, this painting marks a “watershed” moment in their relationship, as Renske began “to think about what I could achieve for myself, other than being my husband’s full-time model and muse”.

In this way, The Girl in the Green Jumper offers an invigorating antidote to what the writer Moya Lothian-Maclean calls “romantic victimhood”, serving instead as a complex study of two entangled lives. In short, it is the story of a multivalent relationship that gives no easy gloss on the sacrifice demanded by art – and love.

• The Girl in the Green Jumper: My Life with the Artist Cyril Mann. By Renske Mann, Pimpernel Press Ltd, £30