The Live Model, Ca 1892 Belle Epoque Nude with Attitude, Paris by Woman Artist Oil on Canvas

Here is a nude with attitude. She is mature, there is a hit of salt in her pepper coloured hair. She has been around the block a few times. As she is sitting on a stool, modelling for a live class with a little pout, her expression seems to say "Oh you kids....I've seen so many of you come and go".

To my mind, is is obvious that this painting was painted by a woman - there seems to be a particular gender solidarity here.

The artist is Rose Marguerite (known as Rose Marie) Guillaume (1871-1947). She studied at the Académie Julien, where our painting was likely painted, the only art school in Paris open to women until 1897. Luckily, it was an excellent school, thanks to the quality of its teaching staff, artist of renown such as William Bouguereau.

Discipline, however, was not the school's strongest suit. The students, most often left to their own devices, stood out for their pranks and their parades in the streets of Paris, scandals succeeding one another at the height of the Belle Époque . Great names in painting associated with the Académie Julian, among others are those of Albert André, Jean Dubuffet , Marcel Duchamp , Jacques Villon, Édouard Vuillard and Henri Matisse.

Marie Rose had a precocious talent; she exhibited her art at the elite Paris Salon from 1893, when she was only 23 years old. Unusually for a woman of her time, specialised in painting nudes.

A portrait by her is now in the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

Works by Marie Rose Guillaume are also in the Tavolozza Foundation, the Saint-Nazaire Museum, the Vendôme Museum and in the Museum of the French Revolution.

The oil painting presented here was painted on on a canvas with the stamp of F. Dupré, a Paris colour merchant who was active from 1888 to 1919 and who is known to have supplied materials to Marie Rose Guillaume

Our work likely dates from the early 1890s. A life study, the painting is signed or annotated on the stretcher bars and sold with a firm attribution to Marie Rose Guillaume. Measuring 55 x 38 cm, the overall size of the picture including a more recent frame is 66 x 49 cm.

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