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 class, 1910, black and white photograph, © Roger Viollet/Topfoto
In Bruce’s autobiography she explains that at first none of the three friends (Gray, Gavin and herself) spoke French. Bruce also gives in-depth details of her daily routine and daily expenditure on food. She rose early at 6 a.m and went bathing. Then she had ‘a roll for breakfast with a cup of chocolate when funds were good, and so back to work at the art school at 8 a.m. At twelve, lunch in a little restaurant, and back to work at one. No tea. Dinner at seven. Occasionally back to the night class, occasionally a club dance or the gallery of the opera, but more usually home to bed’. Bruce’s daily expenditure on food was 95 centimes. She won a competition shortly after arrival and as a result did not have to pay fees. She was then appointed Massier where she became responsible for posing the model on the Monday morning, calling time for classes, stoking the fire and opening windows at lunchtime.
The integration of the students often resulted in men’s conversation evolving around whether the various foreign women were gentiles (sexually encouraging) or a nouvelle (a new female student). One female student at the Colarossi wrote ‘what seems simply rowdy in the men immediately appears unattractive in the girls ... we do have it harder’.48 Haweis also remarks on this in his memoirs, ‘Soon clean, neatly dressed American and English girls were seen in the Latin Quarter and they had come to study art but not so assiduously as the art students studied them’.49 Of the Parisian lack of reserve one student noted, ‘There is a childish joy in living, in letting oneself go the way nature seems to like it best, without much concern about whether it is good or bad’.50 Haweis noted that those ladies who fell for this Parisian lack of reserve sullied their own reputation. ‘Due to champagne and association with French girls a few girls encountered trouble and such risks had to be curtailed. An American girls club started which tried its best to provide protection for pure maidens – with considerable success – but the sinful remained outside’.51 Anatomy classes at the École des Beaux-Arts provided a forum where students watched their professor articulate the movement of the bones with plaster casts, skeletons and at times cadavers. Mina Loy describes in detail one such anatomy class. ‘It (the cadaver) was hung from an iron hook fixed in its cranium to a seated posture on a rickety chair’, she recalled, ‘When the lecturer hurrying across the platform to specify a muscle lifted its arm and, on being dropped, that arm slid off the dead man’s thigh’.52