By Sara Evans
A wallboard at this summer’s blockbuster John Singer Sargent exhibit at New York’s Metropolitan Museum posed an intriguing question: “Do you have to be French to be a Parisienne?” For the countless young American women artists who flocked to the City of Light in the early 1900’s the answer was a resounding “Yes!”
In The Club: Where American Women Found Refuge in Belle Époque Paris (Bloomsbury 2025), Jennifer Dasal tells us this generation came by the thousands, and from every corner of America, enabled by faster (it only took a week!) and cheaper steamship passage. The pull of Paris was irresistible. These women were inspired by first-hand accounts that filled both local and national newspapers. The American press, Dalal observes, was obsessed with the lives of young American women making their way in Paris. Everyone was obsessed with La Vie Bohème. Popular magazines of the time—Town & Country, Scribner’s, Harper’s Weekly, Harper’s Bazaar, and the Saturday Evening Post—profiled the happy travelers. And hometown papers printed letters from local girls on their grand adventure. Like many ex-pat communities, the American colony was snipy and gossipy. Artist Elizabeth Jane Gardner remarked, “It is difficult to sneeze in the American colony without being heard on the other side of the Atlantic.”
Young women were drawn to the City of Light by the glamorous paradox of a dazzling, brand-new city in the heart of the Old World. They flocked to a newly rebuilt and newly imagined Paris, commissioned by Emperor Napoleon III and designed by Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann. The city had risen from the ashes of medieval squalor and now, radiating outward from the Étoile, one found a starburst of modern apartment buildings with small, elegant balconies. The desirable arrondissements with their parks and small green squares filled with trees and flower beds, all segued into spacious suburbs.
But it wasn’t just the physical beauty of the city that drew young American women to Paris. It was the food, the wine, the parks, the nightlife, the art, the cosmopolitan population and the freedom—a life so different from the stifling conventions they had left behind. Paris offered women artists opportunities unknown in America. While many of them had studied art at home, the enticements of the Paris scene, the opportunity to learn from some of the greatest painters and sculptors of the day, and to draw nudes from life, were major draws. Another enticement was the element of escape—escape from the expectations of marriage and the confines of American domesticity. What had American parents wringing their hands was the possibility of danger, the perils of the unknown. Henry James’ popular 1870 novel, Daisy Miller, served as a cautionary tale about a New World innocent compromised by European mores and unscrupulous foreign men. What could be done to offer them a safe and welcoming place to live?
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Dasal draws on the essays in the catalog, Americans in Paris: 1860-1900, a landmark exhibition that travelled from the National Gallery in London to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Metropolitan Museum in New York in 2006. In her essay, “At Home in Paris,” curator and Sargent scholar Erika Hirshler observes that la vie Bohème wasn’t all that rosy. Few of the arrivals spoke even a little French, which isolated them from the broader community, making assimilation into the Paris art scene difficult.
In Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York Lauren Elkin, who moved to Paris, noted, “The French demand total assimilation, even as they remind you of your essential, immutable difference.”
Some of the young American women who tossed up in late 19th-century Paris came from wealthy families. Often accompanied by paid companions or chaperones, they had lives of comfort and elegance. But many more came from middle-class backgrounds, and Paris enabled them to live within their means. Still, aspiring female artists often lived very close to the bone, going hungry to pay for rough accommodations, surviving on meager rations, and with barely enough money for art lessons and supplies. Part of the problem, as Dasal points out, is that they received half the training as the men and paid twice the tuition. With small budgets, they lived in unheated attics and scrimped on food.
Wealthier women could afford private homes or suites and also pay the fees of the Académie Julien (unlike the more prestigious École des Beaux Arts, the Académie accepted women). Yet the less well-to-do shared unheated rooms, crowded with their easels and a few personal belongings.
Two prominent members of the Paris ex-pat community were aware of their plight. Mrs. Whitelaw Reid, née Elizabeth Mills, was immensely wealthy. Her husband was the American ambassador to France. Her friend, Helen Pert Newell, the wife of a clergyman associated with the American Cathedral in Paris, hosted Sunday dinners for some of the younger members of the artist’s colony.
These benefactors first offered a gathering space where homesick American girls could make friends over a cup of tea and read English-language books, magazines and newspapers. Reid and Newell later offered decent, affordable accommodations as well, creating the American Girls’ Club, in 1892—a lovely 18th century mansion in the Latin Quarter, on the rue de Chevreuse, with a large forecourt and welcoming rear garden. The Club was ideally located, close to affordable cafes, shops that sold art supplies, and close to many classes and ateliers. A former school for boys, it had plenty of space and many eager women, all in need of a proverbial room of their own. It wasn’t the Ritz, it wasn’t Le Grande, but it was clean and safe and affordable.
Each room came equipped with a daybed. Residents added decorations and additional furnishings, usually scrounged from Latin Quarter’s second-hand shops. Each woman had to provide fuel for her fireplace and enough water for her daily needs (there was a convenient bath house nearby.) The Club charged modest fees for the rooms and had no shortage of takers. There were tiny chambers and bigger spaces for sharing. The crown jewel of the Club was its restaurant, open to the public and offering beautifully prepared, affordably priced food. The Club’s soirees and afternoon teas in the courtyard was an ideal place for young Americans in Paris to network. It became known as the spot to “meet and mingle.”
The Club also hosted Christmas sales of the residents’ art, which were popular with other members of the American colony as well as with the locals. A lot of the art was criticized for being boring and pedestrian. But it sold. As critic Adam Gopnik has noted, “There is a constant paradox of art-making: As an art form accelerates, its content grows more nostalgic.” Then, as now, nostalgia was in vogue.
As the Club grew and became a key element in the American arts scene in Paris, it attracted the attention of more established artists. Eventually, it morphed into the prestigious, influential and often contentious AWAA, the American Women’s Art Association. Club resident Anne Goldthwaite befriended the brilliant Gertrude Stein, who introduced her to modern art and artists, to Fauvism and Cubism, and to her friends, Picasso and Matisse. Goldthwaite was a passionate feminist, who believed that being a wife and an artist were mutually incompatible. “The best praise that women have been able to command until now,” she said, “is to have it said that she paints like a man. Not that women have a valid place as artists is both obvious and logical…We want to speak to…. an audience that asks simply, ‘Is it good,’ not ‘Was it done by a woman?’”
Living at the epicenter of the Paris art scene was beyond exhilarating, with opportunities to see the works of the French impressionists and post-Impressionists—as well as prominent American painters. Among these were Whistler, Homer, Sargent, Eakins, Hassam, Chase, Prendergast, along with the Cecelia Beaux, Mary Cassatt, the publicity-shy Elizabeth Nourse, Lila Cabot Perry, and Anna Elizabeth Klumpke, who painted the inspirational godmother of them all, the noted 19th century French landscape painter and realist sculptor, Rosa Bonheur.
Of course, there were affairs. Elizabeth Jane Gardner personified the bohemianism, shocking those back home by shacking up with artist William-Adolphe Bouguereau (whom she later married). Like all expat communities, Paris was gossipy and insular. But it also energized and enabled the next generation of women artists.
Some of the residents of The Club were outstanding artists, who studied at the École des Beaux Arts, which finally admitted women in 1897. They began showing their work at the famous Paris salons, the annual and bi-annual juried exhibitions that had been going in Paris since 1667. Others were just fair to middling but dedicated to their art and in love with their adopted city.
While many young women of the Club assimilated into French culture and stayed there, others, like Goldthwaite, returned to America to paint and teach. By taking risks and defying convention, they helped usher in a century in which American women artists took center stage: Snyder, O’Keeffe, Saar, Frankenthaler, Martin, de Kooning—too many to mention—made their mark without having to fight so hard for opportunities and recognition.
While only a handful of the American women artists of the Club achieved real prominence, they all had the inspiration of Paris. The City of Light was in their DNA.
Sara Evans is a lifelong New Yorker and the East Coast editor of Reinventing Home. She has written about travel, child development, gardening, antiques and the arts for The New York Times, Art & Antiques, Town and Country, Travel & Leisure, Parents, House Beautiful, Metropolitan Home, Country Living, Fine Arts Connoisseur, Art of the Times and Martha Stewart Living.
