“The Future of Women Is the Future of the Nation”: Marie-Élisabeth Cavé’s Drawing Manuals and Art Education in Nineteenth-Century France

Abstract

French artist Marie-Élisabeth Cavé (ca. 1809–83) was a successful watercolorist whose works were frequently exhibited at the Parisian Salons and whose art manual Le dessin sans maitre: Méthode pour apprendre à dessiner de mémoire (1850; Drawing without a Master: The Cavé Method for Learning to Draw from Memory, 1868) achieved wide acclaim with multiple editions in the nineteenth century. Yet Cavé has not received much scholarly attention today. This article recovers the history of Cavé and repositions her as an agent of her own success. The simplicity and autonomy of her novel technique, which used repetition to cultivate visual memory, permitted students of all backgrounds to learn to draw. According to artist Eugène Delacroix, Cavé’s method was the only one that could meet the demands of a growing industrial nation. Remarkably, within these treatises, Cavé marshaled the medium of the art manual to inscribe her own ideas about women’s education and work, and to encourage women in nineteenth-century France to become professional artists.