Women artists in all ages and countries

By MRS. ELLET, AUTHOR OF “THE WOMEN OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION,” ETC.
NEW YORK: HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS, FRANKLIN SQUARE.
1859.
Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year one thousand eight hundred and fifty-nine, by Harper & Brothers, in the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the Southern District of New York.
TO MRS. COVENTRY WADDELL, WHOSE ELEGANT TASTE AND APPRECIATION OF ART, AND WHOSE LIBERAL KINDNESS TO ARTISTS, HAVE FOSTERED AMERICAN GENIUS, This Volume is Inscribed BY HER FRIEND
THE AUTHOR.
I do not know that any work on Female Artists—either grouping them or giving a general history of their productions—has ever been published, except the little volume issued in Berlin by Ernst Guhl, entitled “Die Frauen in die Kunstgeschichte.” In that work the survey is closed with the eighteenth century, and female poets are included with painters, sculptors, and engravers in the category of artists. Finding Professor Guhl’s sketches of the condition of art in successive ages entirely correct, I have made use of these and the facts he has collected, adding details omitted by him, especially in the personal history of prominent women devoted to the brush and the chisel. Authorities, too numerous to mention, in French, Italian, German, and English, have been carefully consulted. I am indebted particularly to the works of Vasari, Descampes, and Fiorillo. The biographies of Mdlles. Bonheur, Fauveau, and Hosmer are taken, with a little condensing and shaping, from late numbers of that excellent periodical, “The Englishwoman’s Journal.” The sketches of many living artists were prepared from materials furnished by themselves or their friends.
It is manifestly impossible, in a work of this kind, to include even the names of all the women artists who are worthy of remembrance. Among those of the present day are many who have not yet had sufficient experience to do justice to their own powers, and any criticism of their productions would be premature and unfair.