2.10 Paris VI – Montparnasse, circa 1900, black and white photograph, © Roger Viollet /Topfoto
Montparnasse by all accounts in 1902 was a pastoral outpost on the edge of the city and still retained traces of peaceful country life. The area would soon undergo rapid transformation. Work had just begun on extending the Boulevard Raspail and houses and shops were being replaced by multi-storied modernist buildings and artists’ studios. Across the Seine women art students may have been leading disciplined and respectable lives – however as art students they were still viewed with disdain. Bruce summed up public opinion in her autobiography. ‘In the first years of the twentieth century to say that a lass, perhaps not out of her teens had gone prancing off to Paris to study art was to say that she had gone irretrievably to hell’.31 Nonetheless, women artists were already studying there in increasing numbers, and lived without outraging public opinion. Clive Holland, a British journalist, wrote, ‘That the life they lead differs from that led by their male companions, both as regards its freedom and its strenuousness, goes without saying; but its (sic) sufficiently Bohemian for the most enterprising feminine searcher after novelty’.32 Haweis described life as exceedingly difficult for artistic women who, when left to their own devices, had few choices once their financial support ran out, other than prostitution. The American expatriate painter Romaine Brooks (1874-1970), a friend of both Gray and Haweis, recalled her adventures in the turn-of-the-century Montmartre, where her attempts to earn a living included stints as an artist’s model and a brief career as a music-hall performer. Many female art students boarded in family-style pensions; the more emancipated found their own apartments. Most young women rented rooms in the studio complexes around Montparnasse and set up housekeeping on a modest budget. Many students, including Paul Henry, first lodged at the Hôtel de la Haute Loire, at 203, boulevard Raspail. Haweis amusingly comments that ‘the memoirs of the concierge in the old Hôtel de la Haute Loire should be interesting reading. There are so many who went there in search of cheap accommodation who were poor, but very often talented. It was from there so many of us went away when we had found even cheaper roofs shared in stern virtue or unquestionable sin’.33 Within a short time, Henry and Haweis managed to find a ‘ramshackle, and out-at-elbows, but adorable studio’ in a now-demolished building in the rue de la Grande Chaumière, a street more redolent of art and artists.
2.11 Countess Markievicz in uniform, 1915, photographic negative glass, Keogh Photographic Collection © National Library of Ireland
There was a well in the garden, from whence they drew water, and the toilets, which were in the courtyard, were appalling. Haweis describes in detail the studio off the courtyard where he lived. It was clearly subdivided between those with money and those without. ‘At one sad moment I lived in an underground studio in Paris, a cellar which had once been endured by two brothers who became famous illustrators in the Saturday Evening Post.34 Its claim to be a studio at all rested upon its having a top light; it had no other. Above my head, on the ground floor, dwelt Countess Markievicz and her very large Polish husband, but they did not concern themselves with those who frequented the bowels of the earth beneath’. In later notes that he had edited he said:
Before I married I had a studio which had a top light only for the good and sufficient reason that it was underground. Above was the studio of the beautiful Miss Gore Booth, the Irish patriot, who was married to a Polish Count Markievicz. I knew them slightly, but was not included in the gay parties which often took place over my head. I complained of the light in that wretched studio, which by the way had formerly been occupied with the Leyendecker brothers who made brilliant pictorial covers for the Saturday Evening Post in the USA. Rodin did not seem to think the light of a studio made much difference. ‘I can paint anywhere,’ he said. ‘I spread my watercolours out on the floor and colour them all together. Anywhere any light is good enough, no?’ It helped cure me of the superstition that a studio must have a north light.
Paul Henry also recalled Constance Gore Both. ‘The only other person I knew was Miss Gore Booth who afterwards married Count Markievicz, who had been one of my fellow students at Julians. The Gore Booth as we called her was very attractive and gay’. Whether Gray ever had the opportunity of making this Irish patriot’s acquaintance is mere speculation. Gavin and Bruce later took a studio together at rue Delambre, as did Loy. Bruce also found a studio for Wyndham Lewis on the rue Delambre. By 1902 Haweis had a studio on the rue Campagne Première as did Gerald Kelly. Gray independently rented a flat in the rue des Saints-Pères on her own. Gray’s mother thought that her daughter’s life was ‘modest and terribly proper’ because her apartment looked so ordinary.35 Those who had less money shared studios. Haweis recorded ‘we shared what we had with the nearest; girls and boys lived in studios side by side in an intimacy unthinkable in any other place in the world, often as virtuously as though they had two chaperones apiece, of course sometimes they drifting into free unions, that were often not without beauty and dignity’.36 Haweis talks about those with money and then says ‘but those who inhabited Poverty Corner had little to do with them. They ate at restaurants (when they ate) like Garnier’s which became Leduc’s, Henriette’s, or the Hole in the Wall’.37
The artistic woman student had to quickly find her feet and work slavishly to achieve her goal. Without guidance and financial support student life in Paris, especially for a woman, was exceedingly difficult. ‘There is plenty of human wreckage floating about in the Quarter; and the tragedy of unfulfilled promise, unaccomplished hopes, is closely knit with student life’.38 Haweis noted in his memoirs that there was almost a competition amongst the students to see who could live for less, as he noted, ‘I knew one ever so cheerful girl who beat me to the minimum by ten pounds’.