A beauty in white

Madeleine Carpentier’s sensitive pastel was very likely the portrait exhibited at the Salon of 1895, with the catalogue for that year’s exhibition including a work by the artist entitled ‘Portrait de M.C.C.’, under number 378. Though the sitter remains yet to be identified definitively, there is reason to believe that it is Carpentier’s sister, and pupil, Marie-Paule, who was herself an artist. In this case, ‘M.C.C.’ would be a typographic error for ‘M.P.C.’, an understandable mistake in a salon catalogue of over three and a half thousand entries. An identification of the sitter with Marie-Paule rests on a few factors: the intimate dedication to the ‘cher et charmant modèle’; the physiognomic similarities with Marie-Paule in a full-length painting of her by Carpentier, now in the Musée de Beaux-Arts de Nantes; and finally the youth of the sitter, which corresponds with Marie-Paule’s age of nineteen in 1895.

Madeleine Carpentier studied with Joseph-Benjamin Constant and Jules Lefebvre at the Académie Julian. The Académie Julian, founded by Rodolphe Julian in 1868, was one of the few places in France, and indeed Europe, where a woman could be taught art to the same level and with the same opportunities as men.

Carpentier exhibited regularly at the Salon from 1885 onwards, gaining a ‘mention honorable’ in 1890 and a medal in 1896 for two pictures depicting infants: Communiantes, a pastel, and Les Chandelles, a painting which was acquired by the city of Paris and was illustrated in the 1905 book Women Painters of the World. In 1899, another Salon picture, Le Marchand des Fleurs, was purchased by the French state. Carpentier joined the Union des Femmes Peintres et Sculpteurs (U.F.P.S), an annual salon for female artists founded by the sculptor Hélène Bertaux in 1881, exhibiting regularly, and winning the gold medal at the exhibition of 1905.3 She continued to have success at the Salon over the next few decades, winning the gold medal in the Salon of 1930, and several more of her works were acquired by the French state, such as the monumental Les Résignés of 1909.