Jean Béraud

In the collection of C. Wright;

Sale: Christie's, London, October 3, 1975, lot 78;

Sale: Sotheby's, New York, May 5, 1999, lot 330;

Private Collection, United States;

Sale: Sotheby's, New York, April 24, 2009, lot 77;

Private Collection;

Acquired from the above by the present owner.

Toulouse-Lautrec, exh. cat., New Haven, 1991, p. 514, illustrated p. 512

Patrick Offenstadt, Jean Béraud 1849-1935, The Belle Époque: A Dream of Times Gone By, Catalogue Raisonné, Cologne, 1999, p. 239, no. 313, illustrated

Paris, Salon, 1926, no. 92

The first woman law student was Mlle Jeanne Chauvin. In 1892, she received her doctorate in law and applied for admission to the bar. Despite her defense that she had spent ten years of her youth and considerable money to qualify herself for a profession she loved, she was denied admittance. The feminist Maria Deraismes was extremely critical of this decision, wondering aloud if judges were afraid of being seduced by women lawyers, or whether they feared that one might give birth in court. It was not until 1900, after years of effort, and the personal intervention of statesmen like Poincaré and Viviani, that the legal profession was declared open to women on the same terms as men. A few weeks after this decree, Mlle Chauvin was admitted to practice and in 1925, she received the Legion of Honor. Still by 1914 only about twenty-eight women had taken the lawyer's oath in court, and of these only a dozen practiced (Priscilla Robertson, An Experience of Women: Pattern and Change in Nineteenth Century Europe, Philadelphia, 1982, pp. 335-6).