Nineteenth-Century Women Artists : Sisters of the Brush

An illustrated exploration of the lives and work of women artists in the 1800s, many of whom remain largely unknown.

The nineteenth century saw the emergence of more professional women artists than ever before, but they still faced an age-old presumption: that a woman’s role in life was to marry and have children. If they were ambitious enough to flout convention, they were still hampered by their lack of proper training. But from mid century onwards, women were able to attend private art schools in Paris and could, for the first time, study the nude figure. Many of the artists who flocked to the city were emancipated new women who had the confidence to take advantage of their newfound freedom and a thriving art market.

This book examines the careers of well-known artists like Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot alongside those who have been consistently ignored by museums, galleries, and art historians. It introduces superb artists from the United States, Britain, Scandinavia, Finland, and Russia. The chapters describe the life of foreign students attending the Paris art schools; the artists’ colonies that spread throughout Europe; the young Americans who traveled to Rome to pursue careers as sculptors; and the often tragic lives of women who acted as muses to male artists. The book is enriched with sixty illustrations in glorious color.

For much of the nineteenth century, women artists laboured under the same restrictions and taboos they had endured for centuries, and it was assumed that marriage and child-bearing were their goals in life. However, by the 1870s female art students of every nation were flocking to Paris in search of instruction in the city’s private art schools. With proper training, they now had the confidence to tackle a wider range of subjects and by the century’s end they were at last able to study the nude figure. During these breakthrough years, women won the right to work and exhibit alongside men, both in Europe and America, and the advent of art galleries and art dealers opened up new ways of selling their work. This book is full of surprising adventures: young women, still not allowed to visit a museum unchaperoned, travelled thousands of miles in a quest for first-class tuition; several Americans, while still in their twenties, journeyed to Rome to study sculpture; numerous free and independent women joined the artists’ colonies that sprang up all over Europe, where they made lasting friendships, painting from dawn to dusk en plein air and enjoying the bohemian life. These trailblazing women rose to the challenges of the century’s dramatic development in art styles – from Realism to the Avant-Garde – and triumphantly succeeded in becoming successful professional artists.