Page:Women in the Fine Arts From the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentiet.djvu/48

Rh studios small classes of pupils are received; in schools of Design, schools of National Academies, and in those of individual enterprise, all possible advantages for study under the direction of the best artists are provided, and these are supplemented by scholarships which relieve the student of limited means from providing for daily needs.

All these opportunities are shared by men and women alike. Every advantage is as freely at the command of one as of the other, and we equal, in this regard, the centuries of the Renaissance, when women were Artists, Students, and Professors of Letters and of Law, filling these positions with honor, as women do in these days.

In 1859 T. Adolphus Trollope, in his "Decade of Italian Women," in which he wrote of the scholarly women of the Renaissance, says: "The degree in which any social system has succeeded in ascertaining woman's proper position, and in putting her into it, will be a very accurate test of the progress it has made in civilization. And the very general and growing conviction that our own social arrangements, as they exist at present, have not attained any satisfactory measure of success in this respect, would seem, therefore, to indicate that England in her nineteenth century has not yet reached years of discretion after all."

Speaking of Elisabetta Sirani he says: "The humbly born artist, admirable for her successful combination in perfect compatibility of all the duties of home and studio." Of how many woman artists we can now say this.

Trollope's estimate of the position of women in England, which was not unlike that in America, forty-five