Introduction
The Dictionary of Employment Open to Women, published by the London Women’s Institute in 1898, identified the kinds of commissions that women artists opting for a career as sculptor might expect. They included light fittings, forks and spoons, racing cups, presentation plates, medals and jewelry, as well as “monumental work” and the stone decoration of domestic facades, which was said to be “nice work, but poorly paid,” and “difficult to obtain without personal acquaintance with architects.”² The Dictionary confirms that, despite the nineteenth-century ideology of “separate spheres,” according to which public and private spaces were the domains of men and women, respectively, female artists were not entirely confined in their production to small-scale and small-time art for the home, such as spoons, embroidery, quilts, ceramics, watercolor or porcelain painting, but were sometimes asked to create more public art forms, such as large history paintings and monumental sculptures. Notwithstanding the many obstacles they faced because of their sex, many women did practice the “male” profession of sculpture, and several of them were working on public sculptures, even in the major nineteenth-century metropolises. In line with recent historical research focusing on the experiences of middle-class women in the urban public space³—research that often qualifies or even refutes strict gender partition—a case study of sculptures by women artists suggests as well that the public-private divide was not so clear-cut.

Beginning in the late eighteenth century, the production by “sculpteuses”⁴ for the public realm increased substantially and the number of extant nineteenth-century public sculptures by women is surprisingly large, even though for the most part their visibility in public spaces is, and usually was, low, due to choices of media, format, genre, and especially placement. Literally and figuratively, women sculptors were allowed to operate largely at the margins of the public space, making works with less weighty subjects, in less important formats and genres and for less prestigious venues, frequently for what may be called semi-public spaces—border zones that themselves were in-between the public and the private.

In focusing on the placement as well as the subjects and media of women’s sculptures in the public space, I intend to explore this border zone where women sculptors were allowed to operate and from where, on occasion they could break out into the center of the public arena. This article, which occupies a specific niche in the relatively new research domain of women sculptors,⁵ is not concerned with biography, nor will it tackle the question of women artists’ training opportunities or the institutional and societal impediments they met, however crucial these were for the actual living and working conditions of the women at issue.⁶ My focus in this article, instead, is on the commissioning and placement of women’s public sculptures (of a permanent, not temporary nature).⁷

As this article presents a case study and not an overview of public sculptures by women worldwide, I have restricted its scope to three Western-European capitals: two major (art) metropolises that were especially important for sculpture in the nineteenth century, Paris and London, and one small city in between them, Brussels, added to the mix to achieve a more complete and representative analysis.⁸ The notion of public space is used in the broadest sense as any space accessible by the general public. This means that my study is not confined to exterior spaces that were or are legally defined as “public,” but extends to outdoor and indoor “semi-public spaces,” such as cemeteries, churches, schools, and governmental and cultural buildings (excluding museums), because these seem to form the biotope of women’s urban sculptures. I will use the term “public” to refer to all these spaces.

This article begins with a general analysis of the specific locations of nineteenth-century public sculptures by women in Paris, London and Brussels. The second part explores some female pioneers in public sculpture and the reasons why their work could be, or is often, seen as “marginal.” The third section looks at the different urbanization campaigns of the three cities and the (im)possibilities these offered for women sculptors. The fourth and final section zooms in on the possible relation between gender and the iconographical, material, and stylistic features of the sculptures under discussion, as well as their precise topography within the city.

Though the number of 230 seems high, it is extremely low in relation to the number of public sculptures that were produced by men. The female contribution to the public sculptural repertory in the three cities lies somewhere between zero and three percent.¹⁰ That is not so surprising; not only were sculptresses obviously a tiny minority (between zero and ten percent of the sculptors represented at the Paris and Brussels Salons and the Royal Academy exhibitions of the long nineteenth century, depending on period and city), but they had less reason to hope for public commissions than their male colleagues. Over eighty women sculptors were responsible for the 230 sculptures, which means that, on average, each received fewer than three public commissions in a lifetime, at least for the cities under consideration, as the same sculptresses often received commissions in other places too, often in their hometowns.

More than three quarters of the 230 sculptures are found in Paris. The discrepancy between the numbers in Paris and London is surprising, the more so as in the late eighteenth century the number of public sculptures made by women had been approximately the same in both cities. London does come in second, however, while Brussels, the smallest of the three cities, comes in a distant third. Not only does it have the fewest sculptural objects by women in the public space, but the sculptures also come last chronologically, as they begin to appear only around 1900. While the conditions and contexts in which the sculptures by women in the three cities were commissioned and installed differ greatly according to time and space, it is clear that in all cases urbanization, population, political and economic situation, state patronage, women’s emancipation, and artistic taste played an important role.

Many of the sculptures by women were and still are found in the hearts of the cities for which they were made, which is logical in view of historical urban development. In Paris, this roughly means the first seven arrondissements, in particular the first and fifth, and additionally the ninth and tenth. In London, this means Inner London, to the north of the Thames, particularly the City and the West End, at that time already tourist and “woman friendly” areas,¹¹ as well as the affluent area of Kensington.

In both Paris and London, women’s sculptures can also be found in governmental districts, in or near government buildings and locations of power, such as city halls, ministerial departments, courts of law, or embassies—though they are rarely the most visible sculptures in those areas. A typical example is the bust of Napoleon III by Azalaïs Marie-Louise Lefèvre-Deumier, (born Roulleaux-Dugage; 1812–77), of which the French state ordered one copy in marble and fifty in bronzed zinc in 1852, the year of his coronation. Several of these busts ended up inside Parisian government buildings in the 1850s and 1860s, including the Ministries of Public Works and of Finance, and the Cercle des Préfets.¹² In London, women artists’ sculptures can be found, among other places, in and near the Bank of England, in the gardens of the Inner Temple, and in the Central Criminal Court, commonly known as the Old Bailey, which houses the marble statues of James I (1864) and Charles I (1864) by Thomas Thornycroft and his wife Mary, (born Francis; 1809–95), which were originally intended for niches, which proved to be too small, in the Houses of Parliament.¹³

Women’s sculptures exist not only in the densely populated city cores, but also in the urban extension zones, especially in Paris and Brussels. Sculptures found in these zones most often date from after 1900 and are often decorative rather than political; they were probably meant, in the first instance, to “brighten up” the areas where they were installed. An example is the nude marble Aurora, which the French state ordered in 1904 from Marie-Louise-Henriette-Marguerite Gegout-Gagneur (1857–1945),¹⁴ known under the pseudonym Marguerite Syamour, for the Allée des Orangers in the park of Saint-Cloud but which was placed five years later in the garden of the Ministry of Justice at the Place Vendôme. Various agencies commissioned these public sculptures. In 1905, the marble Fortuna, (fig. 1), by Laure Coutan-Montorgueil, (born Martin; 1855–1915) was placed in the park of the Choisy-le-Roi town hall, thanks to a commission by the Département de la Seine. Two years later, it was the French state, which ordered from Blanche Moria (1859–1927) the marble group The Botanics Class, to be placed in the playground of the Lycée Molière in the sixteenth arrondissement. Not all sculptures in the urban extension zones were “decorative.” Some had a specific, local connection, such as Voltaire’s bust, by Marguerite Syamour, in his alleged place of birth Châtenay-Malabry.¹⁵

In view of the (sub)urbanization of London, one might expect the works of sculptresses to be plentiful in the affluent suburbs and leafy districts on the edges of the city. However, with what appears to be just two exceptions—a multiple altarpiece by Emmeline Halse (1853/56–1930) in Saint John’s Church in Notting Hill (fig. 2), and a funeral monument at Hendon cemetery, presumably designed by the French-Italian Félicie de Fauveau (1799–1886), such works are missing from both the landscape and any reference work.

Though present in the city center, sculptures by women often seem to be confined to its margins. So while nineteenth-century sculptresses themselves often stood out in the profession as “rare birds,” their sculptures were and are much less distinctive in the cityscape, as they are rarely prominently visible in the open air. The “top locations” for monuments—central squares and parks—were rarely allowed to sculptresses. Only about ten percent of the sculptures by women in the three cities from the period 1789–1914, that I traced for this research, stand or stood in a square or in a park. Most of these date from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and are located on the outskirts of the city. The first freestanding sculpture by a woman that was commissioned (in 1910-11) for one of the main parks of Paris, the Jardin du Luxembourg, was not installed until 1919. It was Russian Dancers by the American Malvina Hoffman (1885–1966), which the occupying German forces melted down in 1942 (fig. 3).¹⁶ Also in 1911, the city of Paris bought Yvonne Serruys’s (1873–1953) monumental marble Faun with Children and placed it (in 1930) on the Place Louis Blanc. While that may sound prestigious, the Place Louis Blanc is a forgotten little square near the Gare de l’Est, where Serruys’s sculpture is placed on a pedestal but with its back to a wall (fig. 4).

Could it possibly be argued that nineteenth-century female sculptors suffered from “agoraphobia” (a pathology named in 1871 and, since around 1900, diagnosed considerably more frequently in women), in the figurative, not the psychopathological-diagnostic sense? Was there a kind of unconscious reluctance among nineteenth-century sculptresses to take up public space, as if stepping into the limelight was a difficult move for women to make? This is of course a difficult matter to answer, but my research suggests that rather the contrary was true: at least several of the retraced sculptresses actually tended to “agoraphilia.” They sought the public space, in their competing for public sculpture and in their sometimes explicit appeals to the responsible authorities for “good” public places for their sculptures. Letters to commissioning authorities testify to the fact that several sculptresses, just like their male colleagues, aspired to central squares and parks as locations for their works.¹⁷ They strove for the best spots, but were usually kept from them. Probably deeply rooted convictions at the urban planning decision levels, invariably dominated by men, about the role and place of women in society played a role in this. Indeed, if there was a phobia that stood in the way of women artists’ occupation of public spaces, it rather was gynophobia—a term used not in a psychopathological but in a figurative sense.

Only during the latter decades of the twentieth century did permanent sculptures by women (Germaine Richier (1904–59), Louise Bourgeois (b. 1911), Magdalena Abakanowicz (b. 1930) and Anne Rochette (b. 1957)) get a place in the prestigious Jardin des Tuileries. At the beginning of the century, Thérèse Quinquaud-Caillaux’s 1903 request to place her group Le Passé et l’avenir in the park was refused, as was her offer, seventeen years earlier, to donate Le Porte-drapeau du bataillon scolaire to the city of Paris, provided the city would have the statue cast in bronze and placed in a public space.¹⁸

Most nineteenth-century outdoor sculptures made by women were not freestanding, but somehow related to architecture, as if the building provided them with “support” and “protection.” Bas-reliefs and high-reliefs, placed in or against exterior or interior walls, account for about a quarter of the total number of public sculptures by women. On the whole, reliefs were cheaper and easier to execute than sculptures in the round. In sculptural criticism, they were and are accorded a lower status; indeed, most overviews of nineteenth-century sculpture and most summary guides of public sculpture in the three studied cities pay little or no attention to either relief sculpture or any form of façade sculpture.

Even when they were sculpted in the round, many sculptures by women were attached to, or placed against walls, at times in “sheltering” niches. Marie-Louise Lefèvre-Deumier’s stone semi-nude nymph Glycera (1856-61) for example, is found in a ground-floor niche of the Louvre’s Cour Carrée (fig. 5).¹⁹ Sometimes women’s sculptures are positioned right next to buildings, figuratively and often literally in their shade. In other instances, they are placed so high up on buildings or monuments that they can only be seen from afar, or unclearly, or both. In this category are all sculptures made by women, other than Glycera, for the outside decoration of the Louvre.

Over half of the retraced public sculptures by women were given a place inside a building. Though these sites include important government buildings, esteemed cultural institutions, and impressive cathedrals and churches, interior sculptures, by and large, and with the exception of museum collections, are less prestigious and visible, and they are featured less often in reference works on nineteenth-century sculpture than are monumental open-air sculpture. In addition, interior sculptures done by women are often less prominently displayed than those by men. The monumental walking Saint Hubert with Hounds (1889) by Anne de Rochechouart-Mortemart, Duchess of Uzès, (1847–1933), in the famous Sacré-Coeur basilica in Paris, for example, is almost invisible, positioned as it is in the furthest, darkest corridor of the basilica crypt (fig. 6). Similarly, the bust (1864) of the composer Jacques Fromental Halévy by his wife Léonie (1820–84) is inside the Halévy family vault in the Montmartre cemetery, accessible only to an intimate circle, and the portrait medallions (1867) of Eugène Scribe and his wife by Marguerite-Fanny Dubois-d’Avesnes (1832–1900), are inside their monument in Père-Lachaise, while on both monuments there is also sculpture on the outside, by male sculptors (fig. 7).

The fact that women seldom saw their sculptures in “top locations” can be linked to the genres they mostly practiced (portraits, mythological figures) and the formats in which they worked (reliefs and life-size or smaller-scale sculptures). But was this a cause or an effect of their limited access to the public space? The question is difficult to answer but it remains true that sculptresses were rarely given commissions for the highest genre in the hierarchy of public sculpture: the huge historical equestrian monument in a public square. In the three cities in this study, no woman ever realized an equestrian statue, although there are examples of equestrian monuments by women, dating from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in New York, Washington, DC, Copenhagen, Seville and Blois. Women made some full-length statues, but they are seldom placed on a high pedestal with plenty of space around them. Consequently, public sculptures by women usually do not seem to have been designed for the monumentality of public space; they are often, essentially, interior sculptures that may or may not have been placed outside.

Over half of all public sculptures by women from the period 1789–1914 are portraits, rarely larger than life-size. Although portrait sculpture was often privately commissioned, portraits of famous persons could attain a public function, and be commissioned from public institutions. Surprisingly many sculptresses had access to famous men (and women) through their family and social networks, and thus obtained public portraiture commissions. Obviously, men also made many portraits, but this (lower) genre was deemed especially appropriate for women, in sculpture as well as in painting. Portraiture did not require that women study the nude human body, a controversial issue at the time, and the sitter could come to the sculptress’s home. Most of the busts by women sculptors (many of them of actors, musicians, and artists, but also official portraits of statesmen) ended up in public interiors or in cemeteries, where an intimate, semi-private sphere was preserved.

About one third of women’s sculptures were primarily meant to decorate the public space. Such decorations often would take the form of putti, children, or mythological or allegorical figures, usually female—dressed or nude. The relation between sculptresses and the female nude was of necessity problematic as contemporary viewers were often looking at once for the seductiveness expected of a nude and the chastity expected of a woman artist. This problem was even greater for sculptors than for painters, due to the three-dimensionality of their medium and the fact that it required direct physical contact with the material. The mere thought of a woman shaping a nude in clay with her fingers, as if touching another female body, was shocking to some. Moreover, women’s hands were not supposed to be rough and soiled with clay but soft and clean to caress and care for her husband and children. So, for their nudes to be acceptable, sculptresses had to seek a delicate balance between showing and hiding, between active and passive, and between public and private.

Interesting in this respect is the nearly seven-foot high, full-length Faithful Shepherdess (1863), which the Corporation of the City of London ordered from Susan Durant (ca. 1825–73) in 1861 for the Egyptian Hall in Mansion House as part of a series of statues glorifying English literature (fig. 8). While the subject has one breast revealed, which might be seen as mildly seductive, her gestures refer explicitly to the fidelity of the chaste shepherdess Clorinde in John Fletcher’s pastoral play The Faithful Shepherdess. Like Susan Durant, Hélène Pilate-Hébert, better known as Mme Léon Bertaux (1825–1909), also successfully balanced seductiveness and chastity in her marble statue Psychè sous l’empire des mystères (1889). Though entirely nude, the figure’s closed form, small breasts, and introspective expression lend it an air of youth and innocence and the sculpture, in effect, was praised for its chastity.²⁰ It received a gold medal at the Paris Salon in 1889, was bought by the French State, and eventually ended up in the Luxembourg Gardens, in front of a sidewall of the Senate (fig. 9).²¹ Feodora Gleichen’s (1861–1922) Diana (1899), high up on a fountain, which was donated by a female private owner for London’s Hyde Park in 1906, is another such example (fig. 10). Gleichen modeled Diana nude, poised to fire a lethal shot—a remarkably active and assertive pose when compared with the more usual, passive portrayal of the virgin huntress, bathing or with bow and arrow hanging loosely in her hand. Gleichen opted for a lithe and athletic figure, presumably to stress Diana’s embodiment of chaste femininity and to reduce the erotic possibilities of her figure, in a period that saw the rise of the “new woman” practicing sports. Similarly, Yvonne Serruys’s state-commissioned monumental nude marble Bathers (1910–13) in the front garden of the Ecole Normale Supérieure (5th arrondissement), shows a chaste and realist femininity (fig. 11). The women appear real—subject to the force of gravity and with defined musculature—and in their intimacy hide rather than show their bodies.

Not only in their sculptures but also in their own lives, sculptresses had to navigate carefully between the public and the private spheres: between the expectations of the art world on the one hand, and those of society and of their own families on the other, that is, if they had a family. Remarkably, a considerable number chose a life without a male partner, without children, or without either.²²

The participation of the most talented and ambitious sculptresses in public sculpture was accepted, but only within certain limits. They received commissions and sold their sculptures, but the orders were seldom for large, impressive works, and the placements were seldom in important sites. Anne Digby’s concept of “borderland,”—a social “gray area,” between the public and private spheres, in which Victorian women enjoyed a certain public freedom,²³—provides a relevant framework for viewing the sculptresses and their works. They were operating in a “marginal area,” where they were tacitly allowed just a little more than what Victorian values stipulated. This “area” did have a “glass ceiling,” though: sculptresses were tolerated up to a point in the public space, as long as they did not become too visible or too “loud,” and as long as their conduct and works were within certain bounds.

Some women were also commissioned to make waxworks for the more prestigious and enduring funeral collection of Westminster Abbey. Among them are the wax images of William Pitt the Elder, Earl of Chatham (1775–79) by the American Patience Wright (1725–86), and of Lord Nelson (1800-06) by Catherine Andras (1775–1860, fig. 12). The latter work was an extremely life-like effigy of the immensely popular naval hero, modeled from life and said to wear some of his original pieces of clothing. It drew a record number of visitors to Westminster Abbey, which was exactly the point of its commission, as the Abbey wanted its share of the flood of visitors to St Paul’s Cathedral, where Horatio Nelson was buried.²⁶ These effigies are among the earliest permanent public three-dimensional works by women in the metropolis. So women artists early on succeeded in obtaining important commissions for enduring wax effigies and in so doing reached a wide and diverse public. But wax sculptures have the disadvantage of being fragile; they do not tolerate heat or too much light, so, after initial prominent displays, they were and are usually preserved in display cases placed in dark corners or cellars. Although most of them are extant, they have lost the public’s attention and, seen as “Low Art” rather than “High Art,” they are missing almost completely from art history.

While enterprising women like Mme Tussaud influenced late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century culture through their wax figure shows, another female entrepreneur, Eleanor Coade (1733–1821) left her mark on the cityscape of Georgian London. Beginning in 1796, she further developed and successfully commercialized an existing procedure to manufacture a hard-wearing artificial stone, and called her product “Lithodipyra,” and, later, the easier to pronounce and remember “Coade stone.” Because there were no quarries in London’s vicinity, many architects and contractors used the material for sculptural decorations, which often carry the imprint “Coade.” More than one thousand designs were produced in Coade’s Lambeth factory. Coade, herself, designed some of these; the others were designed by (mostly male) sculptors that she employed.²⁷

But British female sculptors were not involved exclusively in “low” sculptural forms like waxworks and architectural decorations. In the summer of 1798, the London sculptress Anne Seymour Damer, (born Conway; 1748–1828), thanks to her connections with Sir William and Lady Emma Hamilton, was able to persuade Horatio Nelson to sit for her when both she and Nelson were in Naples. In January 1799, Damer offered a plaster cast of her neoclassical bust of Nelson in modern dress to the City of London Court of Common Council. The marble version, which followed later—it was only finished in 1803 and publicly exhibited the year after—was initially put in the Common Council Room, then in the dining room of the Guildhall when Nelson’s death was announced, and finally in the present Guildhall Art Gallery.²⁸ Damer knew that donating portraits, especially celebrity-portraits, could be a clever strategy to further her career, and she employed that strategy frequently.

Immediately after Nelson’s death in 1805, Damer attempted to secure a commission for a public monument in his honor for the Guildhall. The London Common Council read a letter during its meeting of November 26, 1805 in which Damer nominated herself for the execution of a monument for Nelson:

My Lord, understanding that a statue or monument is to be decreed to the memory of Lord Nelson, I take the liberty most respectfully to offer my services to the City of London on this occasion, encouraged by the honor they have already done me in their acceptance of my bust of that immortal hero. Should I be so highly flattered by the City of London to succeed in my request, no pains nor exertion on my part to the utmost of my power will be spared on the execution of this grand object and every attention will be paid to the orders I may receive on the subject and to the taste of those who shall do me the honor to employ me. Proper models will be made for their inspection and approbation and as no emolument will be required by me, the whole of the sum destined to this work may be employed in the materials to the surplus disposed of as they may decide hereafter…²⁹

In response to her request, the Council members ensured Damer that “they have felt flattered by your very generous and patriotic offer,” but, in the same letter, they informed her that it was decided to hold an anonymous contest.³⁰ Damer participated, but James Smith won.³¹

Nevertheless, Anne Damer may have been the author of the earliest freestanding outdoor sculpture by a woman in London, or even, perhaps, in Europe. The work in question is the metal-reinforced wooden statue of an Apollo with a lyre (c. 1794) atop the former Drury Lane Theatre. Both the theatre and the statue went up in flames in 1809 but they are depicted in contemporary engravings (fig. 13).³² The attribution of the Apollo to Damer has been put forward by Rupert Gunnis, an attribution supported by a few contemporary cartoons that link Anne Damer, an Apollo statue, and the Drury Lane Theatre.³³ One example is a cartoon entitled The Damerian Apollo, published in 1789 by William Holland in London (fig. 14). It shows a sculptress, (the title suggests Anne Damer), in fully “feminine” dress, chipping away at a monumental male nude resembling the Apollo Belvedere.³⁴

If the cartoon in question, indeed, refers to plans (be they realized or not) for Anne Damer to make an Apollo statue for Drury Lane Theatre, it suggests that the idea of a female sculptor making a monumental male nude, to be shown in the public space, was seen as threatening at the time, as Damer is depicted as a destructive force, a threat to Art.³⁵ The force with which her hammer is about to strike the chisel is incompatible with the fine detail of the finished sculpture, and threatens not only to wreck it, but even to castrate it (when the position of the chisel—exactly at the imaginary meeting point of the print’s two diagonals—is noted). Moreover, the other sculpted bodies in the cartoon either lack genitalia, or are protecting them.³⁶ As feminists, who would later plead for women’s right to vote, were sometimes compared to a “castrating mob” and as Damer was an early bluestocking,³⁷ it is not implausible that the cartoon intends to depict a castration scene. It could then be read as a humorous defensive reaction against the new phenomenon of a few bold women, Damer up front, who thought they could infiltrate the "male" domain of sculpture, and the "male" public space at that. At a moment when female artists—and sculptors in particular—their public visibility, and the female gaze (especially at the male nude)³⁸ were anything but obvious, this was undoubtedly considered an all too visible threat to the “natural order” and delineation of space.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Antoinette Desfonts-Gensoul (act. c. 1790–1800), Julie Charpentier (1770–1845), and Félicie de Fauveau, participated in state commissions for the sculptural decoration of Paris. Julie Charpentier, a student of Augustin Pajou’s, received, from the director of Public Works, commissions for two allegorical bas-reliefs—Surgery (1816) and Geography (1821)—for the marble basin under the gigantic plaster elephant—not yet cast in bronze—ordered by Napoleon Bonaparte. By mentioning her desperate financial situation as a single woman of poor descent, who took a badly paid extra job as a taxidermist at the Musée d’Histoire Naturelle, the Minister of the Interior, who had recommended Charpentier for the second commission, may have hoped to save her from a life of poverty through a state commission, for which she thanked him humbly but competently (fig. 15)³⁹:

It is with enormous gratitude to his Excellency that I receive the favor that he has bestowed on me in granting me the commission for a new bas-relief for the fountain of the Bastille. I humbly beg his Excellency to accept my sincerest expressions of gratitude and the assurance that I will do my utmost in order to be worthy of the preference that his Excellency has so kindly shown for me.⁴⁰

Charpentier exhibited the plaster model Surgery at the Paris Salon of 1819, and the model of Geography at the Salon of 1824 but, as the megalomaniac elephant-project came to a scandal-ridden end, they never made the conversion into stone.⁴¹ Thus, the state commissions, prestigious though they were, never brought Charpentier the recognition and visibility she undoubtedly hoped for.

But the largest single group of public sculptures by female artists was produced in the context of the urban metamorphosis of Paris that was led by Emperor Napoleon III and Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann during the Second Empire and its aftermath. Indeed, the biggest increase in sculptural production by women started shortly after 1852, with numbers peaking in the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s. Between 1852 and 1870, over fifty sculptures made by women were added to Parisian public spaces and nearly another seventy between 1870 and 1900. Also, the number of public sculptures by women per million inhabitants was, at that time, almost ten times higher in Paris than in London or Brussels.⁴²

The Second Empire’s forceful, centralized promotion of public works and its significant government involvement in the fine arts, led to an increased demand for sculptors in the second half of the nineteenth century, benefiting not only male artists, but also women in the profession, several of whom were able to seize the opportunities that arose. If the favorable climate for sculptresses seems in marked contrast to the repression of a generation of leading feminist voices during the Second Empire,⁴³ it must be realized that the opportunities were probably due not to a “female-friendly” policy, but to the high demand for sculptors in general, and to the patronage of a few powerful individuals, including the Empress Eugénie, Princess Mathilde Bonaparte, and Count Emilien De Nieuwerkerke, superintendent of Fine Arts under Napoléon III. The latter two, who were in a long-time liaison, were themselves amateur sculptors.⁴⁴

A small group of sculptresses received the lion’s share of commissions to women and in so doing made their modest mark on the cityscape of Haussmann’s Paris. The group comprised Marie-Louise Lefèvre-Deumier, Mme Bertaux, Noémie Constant-Rouvier, (born Cadiot; 1828–88), who used the pseudonym Claude Vignon, Marguerite-Fanny Dubois-d’Avesnes, and Adèle d’Affry (1836–79), the duchess Castiglione-Colonna, who used the pseudonym Marcello. All five portrayed the emperor, the empress, or both, and all except Marcello contributed to the monumental decoration of the Nouveau Louvre. Mme Bertaux, for instance, executed two reliefs for tympana high up on the façades of the Richelieu wing: an allegory of Shipping (1864-5) on the Seine side (fig. 16), and another of Legislation, with two pendants, Charlemagne and Moses (fig. 17), on the courtyard side. The latter was not completed until the Third Republic (1878).⁴⁵

Claude Vignon, who specialized in putti and children, also received several important commissions for the Louvre complex. The young, ambitious sculptress went right to the top with her request for commissions, when in late 1854 she addressed a letter to the Imperial couple.⁴⁶ Her in-the-round allegories Spring and Autumn (fig. 18) were installed on the high eaves of the façade of the Sully wing of the Louvre complex in 1857. That same year, she received the commission for the entire sculptural decoration of the impressive interior staircase to the former library, known as the Lefuel Staircase after the supervising architect Hector Lefuel. The commission involved at least eleven big stone bas-reliefs with allegories of the arts and sciences, and spread over several floors (fig. 19). She also was asked to make three bas-reliefs depicting children’s games, and busts of Socrates and Motteley for the former library itself.⁴⁷ In a letter to Lefuel dated 1859 (the year in which she also bore him an illegitimate son), Vignon thanked him for his approval of the stairwell project and, at the same time, fished for new commissions: “I am very happy that the bas-reliefs for the library staircase please you. I hope the same will be true for any further work you could and would give me. At least, I will always do my best, as the best recompense for an artist is certainly the approval of his judges.”⁴⁸

The audacious sculptress even had access to Haussmann himself, whom she must have known at least since the winter of 1861–62, when she was in contact with him regarding the acquisition of land.⁴⁹ Around that time, Haussmann commissioned the replacement of a marble plate with geometric motifs, which was generally unappreciated, on the renowned Fontaine Saint-Michel, by an ornamental bas-relief with putti and vines (fig. 20).⁵⁰ Thus, Haussmann may have played a role in the awarding of the commission to Claude Vignon. He may even have had a hand in the commission that she secured for three marble children’s groups (1868) decorating the Square Montholon. The groups were removed in 1971 and are now lost.⁵¹

During the Third Republic (1870–1914) women became more frequent and more visible in the public space, the sculpting profession, and the art institutions. Yet precisely when a new generation of sculptresses emerged to take over from their less numerous predecessors, commissions for public sculpture started to decline, partly as a reaction against the so-called statuomanie—the erection of (too) many statues in Paris. During the belle époque, sculpture both literally and figuratively turned inwards, in response to an increased demand from the rich bourgeoisie for small bronzes to decorate their homes. Many women were employed in this lucrative area of sculpture production, which probably gave a new impetus for women to become sculptors.⁵² Of course, many men also worked in this field, which could be regarded as a kind of male borderland zone, one in which they produced decorations for the private sphere of the home.

Even if, during the Third Republic, sculptresses were less involved in the large sculptural projects, such as those inspired by the centenary of the French Revolution and of the Republic, some women artists managed to secure commissions in the city center.⁵³ While Claude Vignon wrote a letter to the prefect of the Seine to express her anger over the fact that she did not get a commission for the outside decoration of the new Paris town hall, Mme Bertaux realized the full-length statue of the painter Jean-Baptiste Chardin in stone (1879-81). While it is still on the façade of the town hall (fig. 21), the statue is located on the rear façade of the building, and very high up in a niche, almost invisible from street level.⁵⁴ In her letters to the Ministry of Fine Arts, requesting commissions and purchases, the sculptress occasionally lamented that getting commissions, and a career in sculpture, were even harder for a woman:

Allow me to remind you that my last award, which relieves me from having to participate in the competition⁵⁵ requires that I newly devote myself to my studies so as not to go into a decline. The favor that I ask for would be a precious encouragement for me, and would be very useful in helping me continue this career that is thankless and difficult always, but especially for a woman.⁵⁶

After 1870, many busts by female sculptors, partly through state purchases, ended up in Parisian interiors. Among their authors were Hélène Bertaux, Marguerite-Fanny Dubois-d’Avesnes, Elisa Bloch, (born Marcus; 1848–1905), Laure Coutan, Marguerite Syamour, and Jeanne Itasse (1867–1941).

Although women sculptors had had a good start in London at the turn of the eighteenth century, they hardly received any commissions between 1820 and 1850, even though with Victoria’s ascent to the throne in 1837, interest in sculpture was stimulated through competitions.⁵⁷ During the second half of the century, women sculptors realized over twenty new sculptures for the public space, a negligible number in comparison with Paris, in spite of the fact that Queen Victoria’s own daughter, Princess Louise Caroline Alberta (1848–1939), was a sculptress.

In contrast with Paris, many London outdoor sculpture projects were private initiatives, especially those projects in which female sculptors were involved; the initiative for those projects often came from female patrons. An example is the monument for the blind professor and postmaster Henry Fawcett, designed by Mary Grant (1831–1908), and inaugurated in 1886 on the Victoria Embankment, which was constructed by the Metropolitan Board of Works (fig. 22). Grant’s monument for Fawcett, who had campaigned for women’s suffrage, was not a full-length statue but a convincing bronze relief attached to a memorial stone, and was the result of a private initiative of “his grateful countrywomen.”⁵⁸ Another example is Poets’ Fountain, a monument in honor of English poetry, which was ordered by the private patron Maria Mangini Brown, for the end of her own street: Park Lane in the Georgian Mayfair district, one of the classiest, most aristocratic residential streets of London, close to Speaker’s Corner. Mary Thornycroft designed the bronze seated Melpomene/Tragedy and possibly also Thalia/Comedy, while the rest of the ensemble is attributed to her husband Thomas and their son Hamo Thornycroft. The monument was inaugurated in July 1875, but dismantled in 1949, as the government was not prepared to pay the repair costs after it was damaged during World War II.⁵⁹

The contribution of the state was limited as well to the large seated figure of Queen Victoria in Kensington Gardens (fig. 23), paid for by “her loyal Kensington subjects” and designed by Victoria’s daughter Louise. The princess had the idea for this statue, depicting her mother being crowned, on the occasion of the golden jubilee of Victoria’s coronation in 1887. The marble memorial was placed along Broad Walk, one of the main lanes in Kensington Gardens in front of Kensington Palace (where Victoria was told that she would ascend to the throne), and is thus exceptionally visible, even from afar.⁶⁰ The memorial, the inauguration of which was attended by approximately two thousand in 1893, found great acclaim. Even though women sculptors had made several earlier objects for the London public space, as we have seen, this was the first one with such a size and impact. Some commentators therefore drew attention to this, and saw the princess as a pioneer; Building News called the statue “noteworthy as the first memorial executed by a woman erected in the metropolis” and the Art Journal similarly spoke of it as “the first statue, the work of a woman, that has been erected in London” and went as far as to say that “it reflects credit on the Princess as the most satisfactory of the many similar statues now in existence.”⁶¹

Around 1890, London began a series of grand projects of public decoration. While most of the retraced public works by sculptresses in London date back to this period, they were chiefly the result of private initiatives. Waterloo Place, for instance, was lined with statues on high pedestals, including a 1915 bronze statue of polar explorer Robert Falcon Scott (fig. 24) made by his widow Kathleen Scott, (born Bruce; 1878–1947). The monument was an initiative of Royal Navy officers and financed by public subscription. Scott’s monumental freestanding statue is highly visible because of its size, material, and genre, and its placement on a tall pedestal on a square in central London. It was overshadowed, however, by Bertram MacKennal’s 1921 bronze equestrian statue of King Edward VII, in the middle of the same square. The unequal placement of the two statues is directly related to the difference in hierarchy of their respective sculptural genres—the full-length statue versus the equestrian statue—which, in turn, is linked with the difference in importance of the persons portrayed.

It is hardly surprising that Brussels, the smallest city of the three, has the fewest and the fewest early sculptures by women in the public space. What is surprising, however, is the small difference in the total number of public sculptures by women in London and in Brussels, in view of the much larger difference in population. Although London’s population was closer to that of Paris than it was to that of Brussels (the Brussels population in 1900 was about one-eighth of the London population), the number of sculptures in London by women was closer to that of Brussels than it was to that of Paris.⁶²

Even though the Belgian capital saw public initiatives for the erection of sculptures immediately after independence in 1830, and King Leopold II promoted the sculptural decoration of the city since the 1860s,⁶³ it was only in the 1890s that the first sculptures by women artists appeared in the semi-public space. That Brussels had to wait much longer for its first sculptures made by female artists had less to do with the history of urbanism than with the fact that there were few female sculptors in Belgium until the end of the nineteenth century, although more public commissions would probably have stimulated the number of sculptresses in the country. Though female painters and writers had been working in the city since the beginning of the nineteenth century, the first “generation” of Belgian sculptresses, apart from a few earlier exceptions, was not born until the 1860s and 1870s.⁶⁴ Even when, between 1880 and 1909, Leopold II multiplied the budget for public works in Brussels by a factor of ten, female sculptors were not involved in the large sculptural ensembles that were to make the city centre, and particularly areas like the Kleine Zavel (Petit Sablon) and the Kruidtuin (Jardin Botanique/ botanical garden), into an “open-air sculpture museum.”⁶⁵

In 1896, the state bought Hélène Cornette’s (1867–1957) symbolist bas-relief of Saint Agnes, selected by the renowned critic and connoisseur Octave Maus that year at the Salon of La Libre Esthétique, and intended it for the Jubelpark (Cinquantenaire), the planting of which was completed in 1897 for the world exhibition. The relief was never cast in bronze and put in place, however, and the plaster cast ended up in the storage of the Jubelpark Museum.⁶⁶ Most of the open-air sculptures by women in Brussels can be found outside the central “pentagon,” in the south-eastern, predominantly residential suburbs. In a small square in Sint-Pieters-Woluwe (Woluwe-Saint-Pierre), for instance, one can see The Engagement, the only executed part of Henriette Calais’s (1863–1951) ensemble The Love Fountain, designed around 1900 for the Josaphatpark in Schaarbeek, but realized only after her death (fig. 25).⁶⁷

The heterogeneity and relatively small size of the corpus of retraced sculptures by women preclude unambiguous answers to these questions, but a few tendencies clearly emerge. Starting from the observation that many statues made by women are closely linked to buildings, one wonders, in the first place, about the nature of the adjoining architecture. It appears that many works by sculptresses in the three cities received a place in, on, or near churches, health or child care institutions, needy women’s residences, and cultural buildings.

About one ninth of the retraced sculptures for the period 1789 to 1914, around twenty-five objects, can be linked to religious architecture, and this percentage almost doubled to one fifth in 1950. Though a male-dominated institution, the church has long known a tradition of female devotion and patronage. In the nineteenth century, especially, women fulfilled social and philanthropic activities within the context of the church. Anne Digby therefore names the church as an example of a “borderland,” an area in between the public and private spheres, where women’s activities in the public domain were tolerated up to a point.⁷¹ Women’s sculptures in those places could also be seen as occupying a borderland between the public and private. In the church the activities of female patrons and artists sometimes came together. The commission to the Scottish Mary Grant for an altarpiece for the cathedral of Edinburgh, for example, came from “the church-women of Scotland.”⁷² Grant’s religious conviction probably contributed to her receiving numerous church commissions in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when the growth of Anglo-Catholicism stimulated an increased demand for church decoration. Her Saint Paul for Saint Paul’s Cathedral in London, though, was not accepted.⁷³

During the 1860s and 1870s, several women were engaged in the exterior decoration of churches. Hélène Bertaux, for instance, made two stone porch sculptures of saints (1865) for the new neo-gothic façade of the church of Saint-Laurent, and a bas-relief with the Paschal Lamb and two worshipping angels (1868-73) for the tympanum of the church of Saint-François-Xavier (fig. 26). Claude Vignon adorned the porch of the new neoclassical church of Saint-Denis-du-Saint-Sacrement in the Marais district of Paris with four cardinal virtues (1865), yet again in relief.⁷⁴