The "Painter Girls"

Introduction

Traditionally, the art world had been the realm of men, which isn’t to say that women have not been engaged in creating art. Over the centuries, women have made significant contributions to art by creating masterpieces, pioneering in art movements, and using painting techniques that inspire artists today. There is the Baroque Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1652); Angelica Kauffman (1741-1807), who helped found the Royal Academy of Art in London; and the French artist, Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun (1755-1842), one of the leading painters of the eighteenth century.

However, only a few of the art-viewing public know of them or their art.

Studying to become an artist as a woman was not easy. For many years, they were not allowed to enroll in art classes at all, and then later, when they could enroll, they were prohibited from working with nude models, thus inhibiting them from understanding anatomy. To study art, women went to famous art museums to copy famous paintings¾but they could not go alone, they had to be chaperoned. In 1857, Berthe Morisot, for instance, with her sisters, Yves and Edma, went to the Louvre to study by copying Titians.