The Women Who Paid Double

For most of three centuries, a woman who wanted the same painting education as a man paid more and got less. The clearest case is a number. At the Académie Julian in Paris, the published 1902 fee schedule charged women 700 francs a year and men 400, for the identical curriculum in the same building. But the double fee is only the visible edge of it. Across five training systems in France, Germany, England, and America, women were shut out of the state schools that were free to men. They were barred longest from the life class that sat at the center of the whole education. And when they were finally let in, they were taught in separate rooms under separate rules. They answered by building academies of their own and paying for them twice over. This is the story of that bill, told partly through Marie Bashkirtseff, whose diary is the sharpest record we have of what it cost from the inside.

The double fee

Start with Julian's, because the number is so plain. The Académie Julian was a private Paris atelier founded in 1868, and its whole business model was the open door: no entrance exam, no French-language requirement, no portfolio, just tuition. That door let in the two groups the official system pushed away, women and foreigners, and it taught women the full academic curriculum, casts to the nude model, the same course men took.

For that it charged women about double. The 1880s rate ran near 500 francs a year for women against 300 for men, and by the published 1902 schedule it was 700 against 400, or 100 francs a month against 50. The school's stated reason was that the separate women's ateliers cost more to run, and, more quietly, that female students did not have to earn the money themselves. Whether that was a real cost or a markup on a captive market is a question the historical sources raise and cannot settle. The captivity is the part that is not in doubt. Women paid Julian's premium because the free alternative was closed to them.

The free school that shut them out

That alternative was the École des Beaux-Arts, the French state school, and its tuition was free. Free, and closed to women until 1897. For most of the nineteenth century, the most rigorous and most affordable painting education in the world excluded half the population by rule. That is exactly what handed Julian its captive market, and its licence to charge double.

Getting the rule changed took about twenty years of organized pressure, led by the Union des Femmes Peintres et Sculpteurs, founded in 1881 by the sculptor Hélène Bertaux. The vote finally came in 1897. Even then admission was not equality. Women were taught at first in a separate workshop, kept from the male nude, and barred from competing for the Prix de Rome, the system's highest prize, until 1903. Julia Morgan passed the architecture examination in 1898 as the first woman through. So the public school that cost nothing was the one that resisted longest, and the private school that overcharged was the one that actually trained them. That inversion is the engine under this whole story.

The academy they built themselves

Where no open private option existed at all, women built one and paid the full freight. Munich is the case study. Women had been admitted to the Munich Academy in small numbers between 1813 and 1839, then barred from matriculation entirely from 1852 to 1920, with the sculptor Elisabeth Ney standing as the rare exception.

So in 1884 the Munich Association of Women Artists founded its own school, the Damenakademie, teaching the same course the men had, the nude included. The price of the parallel is the whole argument in two figures. The men's Royal Academy charged around 7 Marks a year. The women's Damenakademie cost 400. For the training the state gave men almost for free, women built a separate institution and paid roughly fifty-seven times as much. A state subsidy arrived only in 1894. The school closed in 1920, the year the Academy finally reopened its own doors. Exclusion was not just a closed gate. It carried a bill, and the excluded paid it.

The last room to open

The barrier at the center of every one of these fights was the same: the life class, drawing and painting from the nude model. It was considered the indispensable core of a serious training, the thing that separated a professional from an amateur, and it was the room women were kept out of longest, on grounds of propriety.

The Royal Academy Schools in London are the clearest illustration. The Academy had two women among its founders in 1768, Angelica Kauffman and Mary Moser, and it still barred women from the life room for another century and a quarter. Women were admitted as students only from 1860, and even then the life class stayed closed. Petitions in 1879 and 1883 were refused. The 1883 petition, signed by sixty-four female students, put the professional stakes exactly: "almost all of us rely on the profession we have chosen as our future means of livelihood. Therefore a class which is considered so essential to the training success of male students must be equally so to us."

Segregated life classes for women finally opened in 1893, and the terms show how much the propriety was about the men. In the women's class the male model was covered, wearing "bathing trunks with a length of fabric wrapped around them," or a "voluminous, belted loincloth." The female model, for the same women's class, posed fully nude. And the training itself was rationed by sex in ways that decided careers. In 1885 a male student submitted drawings of the whole figure to the juries, while a female student was required to submit only a drawing of the model's head. Give one group the whole body and the other only the head, and you have built the career gap into the curriculum.

The counterpoint

None of this was inevitable, and the proof is that one country moved earlier. The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia opened a Ladies Life Class with a nude female model on 10 February 1868, twenty-five years before the Royal Academy managed the same thing. A partially clothed male model followed in 1877. The commitment ran far enough to cost a director his job. In 1886 the instructor Thomas Eakins was forced to resign after removing a male model's loincloth in front of a women's class. The American academy collided with the same propriety, but from the far side of it.

PAFA also did the thing the European academies would not: it promoted a woman. Cecilia Beaux became its first full-time female instructor in 1895, and Violet Oakley the second female professor in 1912. Beaux had trained in that same Philadelphia system and studied at Julian in Paris, and she named the goal that all of this was moving toward, a time "when the term 'Women in Art' will be as strange-sounding a topic as 'Men in Art' would be now." The American counterpoint does not erase the European exclusion. It shows it was a choice.

What Bashkirtseff paid

The clearest witness to the bill is Marie Bashkirtseff, a Russian-born aristocrat who came to Paris to become a great artist and enrolled in Julian's women's atelier in October 1877. She kept a diary meant for publication, and it is the deepest first-person record of a woman's training in this era. She knew its value herself: "if I die young, I intend to have my journal, which cannot fail to be interesting, published." She died of tuberculosis in 1884, at twenty-five.

The diary shows her paying in the coin no fee schedule lists. She worked to the edge of her health, and was proud of it: "Do you think that if I slept more than three hours a night during concours week, I would have placed as I did?" She leaned on the studio as the one place the rules loosened: "Fortunately there is the atelier. With the atelier I fear nothing." And she named the deeper cost with a precision that still lands, because it is not about paint at all:

"I long for the freedom to go out alone: to go, to come, to sit on a bench in the Jardin des Tuileries... to enter churches and museums, and to stroll in the old streets in the evenings. This is what I envy. Without this freedom one cannot become a great artist."

That is the second half of paying double. A male student walked the city, studied the pictures in the Louvre on his own hours, moved through the streets that were half of the education. A woman of Bashkirtseff's class could not, and she understood that the loss was professional and not only social. The fee was money. The freedom was the rest of the tuition, and only the women were charged it.

None of them, on the evidence, wanted special treatment. They wanted the same room, the same model, the same fee, and the same street. What they got instead they mostly paid for twice, and built for themselves when they had to, which is why the record of who was allowed into which room is a large part of the record of how painting was actually taught.

FAQ

Why did women pay more than men at the Académie Julian? The school said its separate women's ateliers cost more to run, and, less openly, that female students did not have to earn the money themselves. Women paid roughly double throughout, 700 francs a year against 400 for men by the published 1902 schedule, for the identical curriculum. Because the free state École des Beaux-Arts excluded women until 1897, Julian held a captive market, and the historical sources cannot settle whether the premium reflected real cost or that captivity.

When were women admitted to the life class at the major academies? Late, and unevenly. The Pennsylvania Academy opened a women's life class with a nude model in 1868. The Académie Julian taught the nude to women from the 1870s. The École des Beaux-Arts admitted women only in 1897. The Royal Academy Schools in London did not open life classes to women until 1893, and even then covered the male model while the female model posed nude. Munich barred women from its state academy until 1920.

What was the Damenakademie? The women's academy founded in Munich in 1884 by the Munich Association of Women Artists, after the state academy barred women from matriculation between 1852 and 1920. It taught the full curriculum including the nude, at 400 Marks a year, against the roughly 7 Marks the men's Royal Academy charged. It received a state subsidy only from 1894 and closed in 1920, when the Academy finally readmitted women.

Who was Marie Bashkirtseff? A Russian-born aristocrat and painter who studied at the Académie Julian's women's atelier from 1877 until her death from tuberculosis in 1884, at twenty-five. Her diary, written for publication, is the fullest first-person account of a woman's art training in nineteenth-century Paris, documenting the studio, the competitions, and the loss of freedom that women of her class paid on top of the higher fees.

The five academies in this story each have a full record in the Schools Atlas, where the fees, the life-room rules, and the dates are set out school by school.