The mystique of Madame Bertaux

If ever a public monument should have been erected in Paris honouring a great woman, it should have represented Hélène Bertaux. Yet, like so many artists whose careers were swept away by modernist art history, she has been largely under recognised – written out of the picture by a system that still reveres Auguste Rodin as the principal nineteenth-century French sculptor.

Born Joséphine Pilate in 1825, Bertaux trained initially with her stepfather, the sculptor Pierre Hébert, and at an early age secured an apprenticeship with Augustin Dumont, who had won the Grand Prix de Rome for sculpture in 1823. She initially found employment sculpting small decorations for clocks. In 1848 she married Augustin Allétit, who undertook ornamental work with her stepfather Hébert. She first exhibited work at the Paris Salon in the following year, as Mme Allétit (née Héléna Hébert). A young woman who was progressive in her private life, she separated from Allétit in 1854 and established a new relationship with another sculptor two years younger than herself, Léon Bertaux. She began exhibiting sculptures at the Salon from 1857 under the name Mme Léon Bertaux, even though she was not to legally marry Léon until after her first husband’s death in 1865. She was to retain ‘Mme Léon Bertaux’ as her official artist’s name for the rest of her career; while Léon, who adored her and placed her career always before his own, listed himself as her pupil when submitting his own works to the Salon.

Mme Bertaux rose to become one of the most celebrated sculptors working in the Second Empire (the reign of Napoleon III, 1852–70), receiving public commissions from the State, the imperial court and the City of Paris. Statues by her grace the Pavillon de Marsan at the Louvre, the Palais des Tuileries and the Hôtel de Ville de Paris, where they are mostly passed by these days by locals and tourists alike who are oblivious to both their subject matter and creator. In 1864, she became the first woman to submit a sculpture of a male nude to the Salon. Her Young Gaul, a Roman prisoner, 1864, displayed an astonishing knowledge of anatomy and musculature, and was widely praised, earning Mme Bertaux a medal. It was not without its detractors, though, considered unseemly due to the artist’s gender. ‘Whatever talent the Young Gaul, a Roman prisoner displays’, the critic Léon Lagrange thundered in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, ‘we cannot see it as an attempt to be encouraged.’¹Léon Lagrange, ‘Le Salon de 1864’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 1 July 1864, p. 32.

Mme Bertaux had another triumph at the Salon of 1873, where she exhibited her plaster Young girl bathing (Jeune Fille au bain). This earned her a medal and was acquired by the French State, which then commissioned a marble version. This was shown at the Salon in 1876, and the Exposition universelle (World’s Fair) in 1878. A bronze version – generously gifted by Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family to the NGV Collection – was then cast and shown at the Salon of 1882 and the Exposition universelle of 1889, where Bertaux became the first woman to be awarded a first-class gold medal.

Young girl bathing (Jeune Fille au bain) depicts a young girl, reclining in the reeds after her river bath, who while drying herself in the sun, has been surprised by an insect alighting on her shoulder. The work was inscribed with lines of poetry drawn from Victor Hugo’s Les Orientales, XIX (Eastern Poems, 1829): ‘She is there, under the foliage, awake to the slightest sound of misfortune; and blushing, from a fly’s touch, like a pomegranate in flower.’

On Mme Bertaux’s sculpture, Hugo’s fly was replaced with a dragonfly, an insect that can bite if threatened. The sculpture thus became an allegory of a young woman’s awakening to the dangers of life. Mme Bertaux’s biographer Édouard Lepage was later to argue that:

Only a woman could render, with such coquetry, the movement of this pretty, mutinous head; only an artist, gifted with tact, could proportion the fear to the object which inspires it. A man would certainly have exaggerated the young girl’s fright, widened her eyes, stretched out the arms in an ungainly manner, unnecessarily tensed her legs.²Édouard Lepage, Une Conquête féministe. Mme Léon Bertaux, Paris, 1912, p. 40.

In 1873, the sculpture received the utmost praise from the critic Paul de Saint-Victor:

This is the ‘nymph’ as it was understood in the eighteenth century, in the sense of tenderness and voluptuousness! The pose is a piquant blend of mannerism and naturalness. The contours flow, smooth and suave, in a melted model, without softness. We cannot praise enough the pure roundness of the throat, the simplicity of the pelvis, the beautiful formation of the thighs and legs and the flower of flesh spread over this young body which presents itself with grace, in all these aspects.³Paul de Saint-Victor, ‘Salon de 1873’, La Liberté, 22 June 1873, p. 3.

This did not stop the work being lampooned in other quarters, the Journal amusant sending up Jeune Fille au bain as:

A lady with another one on her back
Seriously…
This statue depicts a young girl being bothered by a fly.
Ordinary workmanship.

Someone has nicknamed it:
–––– An advertisement for insecticide.⁴Stenio, ‘Le Salon de 1873’, Journal Amusant, 24 May 1873, p. 8.

The artist did receive firm support in pro-feminist publications, however, such as Olympe Audouard’s Le Papillon (The Butterfly), which declared in 1883 that:

The talent of Mme Léon Bertaux is so great, so real; it is of such a pure essence, so elevated in sentiment, and of such perfect perfection in its minutest details, that it has been accepted without question by the public and by artists. And with French ideas, a woman must have enormous talent to obtain this result.⁵Féo de Jouval, ‘Silhouette: Mme Léon Bertaux’, Le Papillon, 11 March 1883, p. 1.

Mme Bertaux’s greatest claim to fame during her lifetime, aside from her own consummate art, was to be her fervent support for fellow women artists. In 1873 she began privately teaching sculpture to other aspiring young women; and six years later she built her own sculpture school in the avenue de Villiers. The work of her students was soon recognised as being ‘brilliant’.⁶Arthur Baignères, ‘Le Salon de 1879. Troisième et dernier article’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 1 August 1879, p. 152.

In 1881, Mme Bertaux founded the Union des femmes peintres et sculpteurs (Union of Women Painters and Sculptors), which was devoted to advancing women’s artistic rights and opportunities. The first organisation of its kind established in France, the Union lasted for more than a century, only being disbanded in 1995. The Union organised, in 1882, the first Exhibition of Female Painters and Sculptors. This organisation grew over the years to encompass some 450 member artists, who exhibited hundreds of works each winter in Paris, drawing enormous crowds and critical praise. In 1890 Bertaux’s Union also launched a new publication, Journal des femmes artistes (Women Artists Review) to further propagate the feminist cause in art.

The previous year, ‘à mérite égal, récompense identique’ (equal merit, equal reward) became Mme Bertaux’s cry as she launched a new campaign for women’s rights at the International Congress of Women’s Organisations and Institutions in Paris, arguing for women to be admitted to the exclusively male art classes at the notoriously conservative École des Beaux-Arts. Lobbying for this consumed all her energy from now on, at the sacrifice of her own artistic career. As her biographer Lepage noted, her own sculptural practice was put on hold because:

She was so preoccupied by the future of the Union which, still on the right track, continues to prosper; and by the future of women artists, of whom she had made herself, since 1873, the tireless champion, with an energy and self-sacrifice without equal!⁷Lepage, 1912, p. 100.

In 1896, a quiet revolution was achieved, when forty women were admitted into the École des Beaux-Arts for the first time – albeit only for theory classes, practical teaching only being opened to them in 1900. Mme Bertaux’s reaction was immediate: ‘Now it’s on to Rome!’. Thanks to her continued lobbying, women students at the École des Beaux-Arts were finally allowed to compete for the prestigious annual Prix de Rome award in 1903.

The male-dominated art establishment’s vengeance was not long coming, however. After Mme Bertaux’s death in 1909, her husband’s will bequeathed all her surviving works to the French State. This bequest was declined, on the grounds that the majority of the works were plasters, and that her body of work was overall ‘without interest’.⁸ibid.

Now in the NGV Collection, we acknowledge Mme Bertaux and her work Young girl bathing (Jeune Fille au bain) for its important contribution to French sculpture of the nineteenth century and look forward to audiences engaging with the artist’s story now, and for generations to come.

Dr Ted Gott is NGV Senior Curator, International Art.

Hélène Bertaux’s Young girl bathing (Jeune Fille au bain) is a gift of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts program.

This article first appeared in NGV Magazine, Sep-Oct 2024

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