Themed Route: Women artists

This bust of the Empress Eugenie, was an official commission to Marcello, the artist name of Adèle d'Affry, Duchess of Castiglione- Colonna.

Widowed at the age of 20 - she never wanted to remarry - ,she decided to become a sculptor. She settled in Paris, copying the masters at the Louvre and working with live models. 

Although she was not allowed to enroll at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, which was inaccessible to women, she managed, dressed up as a man, to attend dissection classes.

At the beginning of her career, she took the pseudonym Marcello to escape her status of woman and aristocrat. 

Her sculptures, inspired by Michelangelo, were met with great success. She was also a woman of the world, close to Emperor Napoleon III and Eugenie. In the last years of her life, she turned to painting, before dying of tuberculosis at the age of 43.

Over the course of her career, Jeanne Bardey produced around 600 sculptures and 2,000 drawings, engravings and paintings. Born in Lyon in 1872 into a well-off family, she began drawing at the age of 30 with her husband, the decorative painter Louis Bardey.

She moved to Paris in 1907 to perfect her art, where she met Auguste Rodin, who admired her sketches. She became his pupil and last confidante.

Germaine de Roton, 1920-1921, terracotta

Born in 1889 in the Beaujolais region, Germaine de Roton was introduced to art by her mother, who was an amateur painter. Self-taught, she exhibited at various salons in Lyon from 1913 to 1929.

Her mental health declined and  she was committed to a psychiatric hospital in 1930 at her father's request. She died tragically in 1942 as a recluse, probably from the famine that struck patients interned in psychiatric institutions during the Second World War. 

Funeral dance illustrates the artist’s passion for dance, which was undergoing a profound renewal at a time when the female body was being liberated. 

The bodies of these dancers seem to be extracted from the material itself, deliberately deformed to better express the tension between movements and emotions. Germaine de Roton may have been inspired by ancient Greek vases and by the dance of Isadora Duncan, whom she particularl

Anne Dangar, 1950-1951, terracotta

After training as a painter in Sydney, Australian artist Anne Dangar lived in Paris from 1926 to 1928. There she discovered the cubist painting of Albert Gleizes and his theoretical approach to art, a real revelation for her.

Anne Dangar gave up painting to devote herself to pottery.

She made utilitarian objects with rustic shapes and geometric or floral motifs, as well as large pieces whose designs were inspired by Gleizes' paintings.

This two-handled pot in glazed terracotta has a geometric design in a cameo of ochre and green. The graphic treatment of the surface, accentuated by the work on the relief, and the size of this ceramic make it one of the exceptional pieces of her production.

Elise Bruyère, 1817

Born in 1776, Élise Bruyère was trained by her father, the painter Jean Jacques Le Barbier. She was introduced to portraiture and miniature painting and then frequented the studio of Jan Frans van Dael, one of the leading masters of flower painting in the early 19th century.

From the 17th century onwards, the craze for still lives combined with the growing interest for botanic encouraged the development of this pictorial genre, first in Holland, then throughout Europe.

Elise Bruyère’s works, such as Flowers in a vase and plum branch on a marble tablet, bear witness to her perfect technical mastery and acute sense of detail. At the time, women painters were often restricted to the still life genre, which was considered minor.

Élise Bruyère exhibited at the Salon from 1798 on and met with success. In 1827, she was the first woman to be awarded a medal for a flower painting.

Clémence Sophie de Sermézy, 1821, terracotta

Clémence Sophie de Sermézy was one of the first sculptors of the 19th century, but she never sold her art and did not exhibit her sculptures publicly until 1827.

This refined Lyonnaise ran a salon where she entertained figures from the world of art and literature, of whom she produced numerous busts. She sculpted them in the neoclassical tradition of sculptor Joseph Chinard, who had been her teacher. 

This almost life-size terracotta sculpture depicts Psyche, recognizable by her butterfly wings - also known as ‘psychè’ in Greek, symbolizing the soul - and dressed in the fashion of the early 19th century.

The young woman is prostrate, desperate for having unwittingly caused the departure of her lover, the god Cupid, by defying the ban on seeing his face. The artist has depicted the suffering contained in Psyche's features with great sensitivity.