venties or 'eighties,
woman was certainly very much hampered by public opinion. For some
centuries it had been held that she should paint flowers, but not
bodies; nowadays, dizzily soaring, she has begun to paint cranes and
gasometers. The result of the old attitude was that the work of women
was mainly futile because it was expected to be futile; though painters
were not always gentlemen, female painters seemed to have to be ladies,
but times changed. There came the djibbah, Bernard Shaw, and the
cigarette; women began to flock into Colarossi's and the Slade, into the
minor schools where, I regret to say, the new spirit has yet to blow and
to do away with the interesting practice of the life class where the
male model wears bathing drawers. Woman has had her opportunity, and any
morning on the Boulevard Montparnasse you can see her carrying her
paraphernalia towards the Grande Chaumiere and the other studios. She is
suffering a good deal from the effects of past neglect, but much of that
neglect is so far away that we must ask ourselves why woman has not yet
responded to the more tender attitude of modern days. For she has not
entirely responded; she is still either a little afraid of novelty or
inclined to hug it, to affront the notorious perils of love at first
sight.

I believe that the causes of women's failure in painting are
twofold--manual and mental. Though disinclined to generalize upon the
female temperament, because such generalizations generally lead to the
discovery of a paradox, I am conscious in woman of a quality of
impatience.

While woman will exhibit infinite patience, infinite obstinacy, in the
pursuit of an end, she is often inclined to leap too quickly towards
that end. To use a metaphor, she may spend her whole life in trying to
cut down a tree without taking the preliminary trouble to have her ax
sharpened; she does unwillingly the immense labor on the antique, she
neglects her anatomy, she sacrifices line to color.

This is natural enough, for she has a keen sense of color. As witness
her clothes. When clothes are the work of woman they are generally
beautiful in color; when they are beautiful in line they are generally
by Poiret. For line tends to be pure and cold, and I hope I will shock
nobody when I suggest that purity and coldness are masculine rather than
feminine. Color is the expression of passion, line is the expression of
intellect, or rather of that curious combination of intellec