but was not included in the gay parties which often took place over my head. I complained of the light in that wretched studio, which by the way had formerly been occupied with the Leyendecker brothers who made brilliant pictorial covers for the Saturday Evening Post in the USA. Rodin did not seem to think the light of a studio made much difference. ‘I can paint anywhere,’ he said. ‘I spread my watercolours out on the floor and colour them all together. Anywhere any light is good enough, no?’ It helped cure me of the superstition that a studio must have a north light.
Paul Henry also recalled Constance Gore Both. ‘The only other person I knew was Miss Gore Booth who afterwards married Count Markievicz, who had been one of my fellow students at Julians. The Gore Booth as we called her was very attractive and gay’. Whether Gray ever had the opportunity of making this Irish patriot’s acquaintance is mere speculation. Gavin and Bruce later took a studio together at rue Delambre, as did Loy. Bruce also found a studio for Wyndham Lewis on the rue Delambre. By 1902 Haweis had a studio on the rue Campagne Première as did Gerald Kelly. Gray independently rented a flat in the rue des Saints-Pères on her own. Gray’s mother thought that her daughter’s life was ‘modest and terribly proper’ because her apartment looked so ordinary.35 Those who had less money shared studios. Haweis recorded ‘we shared what we had with the nearest; girls and boys lived in studios side by side in an intimacy unthinkable in any other place in the world, often as virtuously as though they had two chaperones apiece, of course sometimes they drifting into free unions, that were often not without beauty and dignity’.36 Haweis talks about those with money and then says ‘but those who inhabited Poverty Corner had little to do with them. They ate at restaurants (when they ate) like Garnier’s which became Leduc’s, Henriette’s, or the Hole in the Wall’.37
The artistic woman student had to quickly find her feet and work slavishly to achieve her goal. Without guidance and financial support student life in Paris, especially for a woman, was exceedingly difficult. ‘There is plenty of human wreckage floating about in the Quarter; and the tragedy of unfulfilled promise, unaccomplished hopes, is closely knit with student life’.38 Haweis noted in his memoirs that there was almost a competition amongst the students to see who could live for less, as he noted, ‘I knew one ever so cheerful girl who beat me to the minimum by ten pounds’.39 He also noted how ‘death took a hand once in a while’ when a young shy Russian woman art student was found dead of starvation in her studio, her arm outstretched, holding a letter containing a cheque from home. He recalled many casualties from poverty in the artistic field. ‘She was not the only one to die of Paris, and privacy and poverty. It was impossible to pause, we were working. One did not listen to hard luck tales except from one’s nearest and dearest; there were too many of them’.40
Gray arrived in Paris just a few years after it became possible for men and women to work together in any class, let alone in life drawing – where the question of the nude was on everyone’s mind. Frenchwomen already attended the École des Beaux-Arts, but they were still barred from the Prix de Rome, a coveted award that assured official recognition following a year’s study in Italy at the Villa de Medici. In 1903 women finally won the right to compete for this fellowship, as did foreign art students, who had been excluded until then and who rejoiced at the news. Not all women welcomed the opportunity as it was considered liberal to study the nude alongside a male student, and some doubted that ‘the female art student who was kept at a distance from real art because of the nude model would accept the shared life of the Villa Medici with young men’.41 Foreign female art students, like Gray, who were Irish, English or American, were long regarded by French men as more masculine than their French sisters, who were thought to represent the quintessentially feminine.42 As the numbers of foreign female students increased at the turn of the century their presence would have presumably constituted less of an affront to propriety. Foreign students usually enrolled in the popular academies of the Latin Quarter or Montparnasse, where no entrance exams were required and women could choose from a variety of classes. All followed a similar structure. An instructor known as the maître chose models, collected fees, and saw to the details of daily life. The École Colarossi was popular among foreign students, and classes had been integrated there for several years when Gray arrived.43 The more conservative Académie Julian offered separate instruction for women, with three different studios ‘arranged to satisfy different sensibilities – one for drawing from the nude model, one for working from a draped model, and a third which had a separate staircase and entrance for amateurs who didn’t wish to even glimpse a nude model’.44 The more experienced women artists felt that access to the male model, draped or nude, was not the most important issue. They maintained that only their full participation in the academic system through membership of the salons’ selection committees would put an end to hostilities between the sexes. Although women painters had won a more equitable status, their success was thought to depend primarily on their social standing. As in London and Dublin, women were seen as amateurs who would either marry or become teachers.
2.12 Mixed art class, England, 1900, black and white photograph ©Topfoto
2.13 Académie Julian mixed class, 1904, black and white photograph, © Roger Viollet/Topfoto
The choice of art school was paramount, since it put the painter in touch with her future mentor. Gray and her friends choose the École Colarossi. Noted for its informal tone and modest fees, the school was located at 10 rue de la Grande Chaumière, above a plethora of studios. It was open from 6 a.m. until 10 p.m. There was an abundance of ateliers, and life drawing classes were not segregated. In the morning, models posed for genre painting which depicted everyday life, or ordinary people in work or recreation, while afternoon classes were devoted to the practice of croquis or quick sketches. There were the standard drawing, painting, watercolour and sculpture classes. These were supplemented by free instruction in anatomy at the Beaux Arts. In addition there were special classes in costume and in decorative arts. Gray attended the drawing classes. ‘Life of the schools is intensely interesting, often amusing, and sometimes even tragic’.45 In her autobiography Bruce describes how new figure models were chosen every Monday morning. ‘At the end of the studio passed one by one a string of nude, male models. Each jumped for a moment onto the model throne, took a pose, and jumped down. The model for the week was being chosen’.46 Clive Holland describes how female and male students worked alongside one another. ‘The stronger natures among the girl art students will probably decide upon attending one of the mixed classes, and there they will work shoulder to shoulder with their brother art students, drawing from the costume or the living model’.47 However, Bruce was shocked to view Gray attending such classes alongside male students, especially while drawing a male nude model. She describes her as ‘standing composedly with her head critically on one side’. Gray is calmly ‘appraising’.
2.14 Académie Julian life drawing
