“Students and Mistresses (1849-1928)”, women in free art – Libération

Accompanied by careful iconography, the collective work provides an overview of artistic education for women from 1849 to 1928, within renowned workshops from which emerged figures recognized for their qualities.

Let us stop, recommends this book with fifteen signatures, from constantly returning, even rightly, to the injustice done to women artists. Prohibited from enrolling in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts until the end of the 19th century, they were deprived of the only apprenticeship supposed to train future “great painters”, which none of them would have become. In fact, if this gendered exclusion has slowed their development and if androcentrism persists in artistic education, two essential facts must not be forgotten. On the one hand, the majority of male painters were not trained in this establishment; On the other hand, many of these budding creators entered, like them, renowned workshops, run by men who opened courses reserved for their sex – propriety obliges –, such as that of Félix-Joseph Barrias or that of the Ladies, headed, in turn, by Carolus-Duran and Jean-Jacques Henner, who fascinated his student Dorothy Tennant.

The determination to deepen their knowledge characterizes these young women, convinced of their vocation, so contrary to the supposedly natural one of mother, as well as their desire to impose their creative originality, which Juliette Roche, enrolled in 1911 at the Académie Ranson, managed to do. This was sometimes in spite of teachers who were not inclined to accept that talent had no gender. An astonishing example is that of Gabriel Ferrier, professor at the renowned Académie Julian, immortalized by the brushes of