Old news
When I was creating classes about women artists during the years of second wave feminism, there were certain assumptions based on the meager information feminist scholars were able to dig up at the time.
One was that a woman who became a professional artist had been trained by her father or another male relative, because women weren’t allowed to attend art classes. Nor were they allowed to hire male models to work from, let alone have a studio to accommodate multiple models. As a result, women’s work was restricted to the lesser forms of art: still lifes (particularly flower painting), portraits (mostly of women), and genre scenes. Such paintings were unlikely to be selected to be shown in the French Salon or the exhibitions of the Royal Academy of Arts.
Sophie Fremiet
How refreshing to hear new research from Paris Spies-Gans during her lecture at the Getty Museum on May 5, “Breaking Barriers: Sophie Fremiet and the Rise of Women Artists in Europe,” research which showed women found ways to forge careers despite all obstacles. After in-depth study of women artists during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Spies-Gans has collected data disproving many of the erroneous assumptions we feminist art historians previously received as gospel. The occasion for Spies-Gans’ talk was the Getty’s acquisition of Sophie Fremiet’s “Portrait of a Woman.” Fremiet epitomizes Spies-Gan’s findings. She and her sister Victorine both studied with Jacques Louis David for years, a sure path to being accepted by the Salon. Sophie went on to a storied career, with Napoleon’s patronage and a critic’s assertion (meant as a compliment) that she was “only a woman by her clothing and [was] a man by talent.”
Art training
Looking at how women artists in history were trained, Spies-Gans found that a significant number of them were taught by well-known male artists, like David. A smaller number studied with women teachers like Adélaïde Labille-Guiard and Marie Victoire Lemoine. And a poignantly minuscule number of would-be artists studied with their mothers, such as British artists Rolinda and Ellen Sharples.
The highest category of painting—history painting—was thought to be closed to women, who had no training in life-drawing so weren’t skilled enough to produce multi-figure compositions. But a self-portrait by Marie-Guillemine Benoist depicts her copying figures from David’s “Belisarios Begging for Alms,” most probably a study for an upcoming copy of that history painting. And women were trained in life drawing, if not within their family circle, then in the ateliers of Jean-Henri Marlet or Charles-Joseph Traviès de Villers, painting the nude side by side with their male counterparts.
With women trained by masters, they became accepted by the art world, and working with men became normalized. Between 1760-1830, seven thousand women’s paintings were shown in the Paris Salon and the British Royal Academy. Even during the years of the French Revolution, when citizenship was restricted to men and there were laws about how many women could assemble in public, women painted. In fact, many women turned to paintings to support their families during the years when men were involved in the revolution. From 1802-1814, the rate of women artist participating in the Salon and the Royal Academy was up to 16%. Consider that the percentage of women represented in the world’s museums today stands at a mere 5%!
The moral of the story
What women are told they can do, and what we are told they have done, doesn’t necessarily match up with the ways women navigated the gendered exclusions of their time. Their marginalization has largely occurred in the centuries since they lived. I’ve learned over time that those who win the wars write the history books. Scholars like Paris Spies-Gans show us that if we question those histories, we will likely be delighted to uncover more about women artists’ accomplishments.
Paris Spies-Gans is the author of A Revolution on Canvas: The Rise of Women Artists in Britain and France, 1760-1830, and the forthcoming A New Story of Art, a history of western art which positions women in the story.