Women artists in all ages and countries

by E. F. Ellet

More than ever perplexed what to do with her, her father now left her for a time entirely to herself. Thus abandoned to her own spontaneous actions, Rosa, who felt that the idle and aimless life she had hitherto led was little calculated to help her to the realization of her secret ambition, and who was full of unacknowledged regret and remorse for her incapacity and uselessness, sought refuge from her own uncomfortable thoughts in her father’s studio, where she amused herself with imitating every thing she saw him do; drawing and modeling, day after day, with the utmost diligence and delight, happy as long as she had in her hands a pencil, a piece of charcoal, or a lump of clay. In the quiet and congenial activity of the studio, her excited feelings became calm, and her ideas grew clearer; she began to understand herself, and to devise the path nature had marked out for her. As this change took place in her mind, the desultory and purposeless child became rapidly transformed into the earnest, self-conscious, determined woman. She drew and modeled from morning till night with enthusiastic ardor; and her father, amazed at her progress, and perceiving at last the real bent of her nature, devoted himself seriously to her instruction, superintending her efforts with the greatest interest and care. He took her through a serious course of preparatory study, and then sent her to the Louvre to copy the works of the old masters, as a discipline for her eye, her hand, and her judgment.

Surrounded and stimulated by the glorious creations of the great painters—the first to enter the gallery and the last to leave it—too much absorbed in her model to be conscious of any thing that went on around her, Rosa pursued her labors with unwavering zeal.

“I have never seen an example of such application, and such ardor for work,” remarked M. Jousselin, director of the Louvre, in describing the deportment of the young student.

The splendid coloring and form of the Italian schools, the lofty idealism of the German, and the broad naturalism of the Dutch, alike excited her enthusiasm; she studied them all with equal delight, and copied them with equal felicity. To aid her father in his arduous struggle for the support of his family, now increased by the birth of two younger children, was the immediate object of Rosa’s ambition; and, the admirable fidelity of her copies insuring them a speedy sale, this filial desire was soon gratified. She gained but a small sum for each, but so great was her industry that those earnings soon became an important item in the family resources.

One day, when she had just put the finishing touch to a copy of Les Bergers d’Arcadie, at the Louvre, an elderly English gentleman stopped beside her easel, and, having examined her work with much attention, exclaimed, “Your copy, mon enfant, is superb, faultless! Persevere as you have begun, and I prophesy that you will be a great artist!” The stranger’s prediction gave the young painter much pleasure, and she went home that evening with her head full of joyous visions of future success.

Rosa was now in her seventeenth year, vowed to art as the aim and occupation of her life, cultivating landscape, historical, and genre painting with equal assiduity, but without any decided preference for either; when, happening to make a study of a goat, she was so much enchanted with this new attempt that she thenceforth devoted herself to the cultivation of the peculiar province in which she has commanded such brilliant success. Too poor to procure models, she went out daily into the country on foot, in search of picturesque views and animals for sketching. With a bit of bread in her pocket, and laden with canvas and colors, or a mass of clay—for she was attracted equally toward painting and sculpture, and has shown that she would have succeeded equally in either—she used to set out very early in the morning, and, having found a site or a subject to her mind, seat herself on a bank or under a tree, and work on till dusk; coming home at nightfall, after a tramp of ten or a dozen miles, browned by sun and wind, soaked with rain, or covered with mud; exhausted with fatigue, but rejoicing in the lessons the day had furnished.

Her inability to procure models at home also suggested to her another expedient, the adoption of which shows how earnest was her determination to overcome the obstacles poverty had placed in the way of her studies. The slaughtering and preparing of animals for the Paris market is confined to a few abattoirs, great establishments on the outskirts of the city, placed under the supervision of the municipal authorities. Each of these establishments contains extensive inclosures, in which are penned thousands of lowing and bleating victims, waiting their turn to be led to the shambles. To one of these—the abattoir du Roule—had Rosa the courage to go daily for many months, surmounting alike the repugnance which such a locality naturally inspired, and her equally natural hesitation to place herself in contact with the crowd of butchers and drovers who filled it. Seated on a bundle of hay, with her colors beside her, she painted on from morning till dusk, not unfrequently forgetting the bit of bread in her pocket, so absorbed would she become in the study of the varied types that rendered the courts and stables of this establishment so invaluable a field of observation for her. Not content with drawing the occupants of the abattoir in their pens, far from the sickening horror of the shambles, she felt the necessity of studying their attitudes under the terror and agony of the death-stroke, and compelled herself to make repeated visits to the slaughter-house; looking on scenes whose repulsiveness was rendered doubly painful to her by her affectionate sympathy with the brute creation. In the evening, on her return home, her hands, face, and clothes were usually spotted all over by the flies, so numerous wherever animals are congregated. Such was the respect with which she inspired the rude companions by whom she was surrounded, and who would often beg to see her sketches, which they regarded with the most naïve admiration, that nothing ever occurred to annoy her in the slightest degree during her long sojourns in the crowded precincts of the abattoir.

After she had ceased to visit this establishment, she frequented in a similar manner the stables of the Veterinary School of Alfort, and the animals and museums of the Garden of Plants. She also resumed her sketching rambles in the country, and resorted diligently to all the horse and cattle fairs held in the neighborhood of Paris. On the latter occasions she invariably wore male attire; a precaution she found it necessary to adopt, as a convenience, and still more, as a protection against the annoyances that would have rendered it impossible for her to mingle in such gatherings in feminine costume. In her masculine habit Rosa had so completely the look of a good-hearted, ingenuous boy, that the graziers and horse-dealers, whose animals she drew, would frequently insist on “standing treat” in a chopine of wine, or a petit verre of something stronger, to the “clever little fellow” whose skillful portrayal of their beasts had so much delighted them; and it sometimes required all her address and ingenuity to escape from their well-meant persecutions. Her good looks, too, in the assumed character of a youth of the sterner sex, would sometimes make sad havoc in the susceptible hearts of village dairy-maids. Some laughable incidents might be related under this head. In her subsequent explorations of the romantic regions at either foot of the Pyrenees, the passion with which she has unwittingly inspired the black-eyed Phœbes of the south has more than once proved a source of serious though comical embarrassment to the artist, desirous above all things to maintain impenetrably the secret of her disguise.

The young artist’s studies were not confined to the exterior forms of her models. She procured the best anatomical treatises and plates, with casts and models of the different parts of the human frame, and studied them thoroughly; she then procured legs, shoulders, and heads of animals from the butchers, carefully dissecting them, and thus obtaining an intimate knowledge of the forms and dependencies of the muscles whose play she had to delineate.

Now that Rosa has arrived at the fame her swelling child-heart prophesied to itself before she had ascertained the path that should lead to the fulfillment of her aspirations, the richest and noblest of her countrymen are proud to place at her disposal the finest products of their farms and studs; while mules, donkeys, sheep, goats, pigs, dogs, and rare poultry are offered to her from one end of Europe to the other. But it is certain that the poverty and obscurity which, during her first years of effort, compelled her to frequent abattoirs and cattle-markets in search of subjects for her pencil were really of unspeakable service in forcing her to make acquaintance with a multitude of types under a variety of action and condition, such as she could never have seen in any other way, and in giving her a breadth of conception, variety of detail, and truthfulness to nature, which a more limited range of experience could not have supplied.