A painter in the Impressionist style, as well as an engraver, sculptor, and writer, Louise Abbéma was one of the most successful women artists of her day. Her media were etching, pastel, and particularly watercolor; as a writer, she collaborated with the journals Gazette des Beaux-Arts and L'Art. She is best remembered for her portraits and genre scenes, and for her relationship with Sarah Bernhardt, but Abbéma also painted flowers again and again. They appear throughout her oeuvre--women hold them in bunches, they fill vases, and they are the subjects of her still-lifes.
Abbéma was born in Etampes, France, the great granddaughter of actress Mlle Contat and Comte Louis de Narbonne. Through her aristocratic family, she had an early introduction to the arts. Tellingly, however, in
Accomplished American photographer Berenice Abbott may be best known for her photographs of New York City's changing cityscape, but she also made memorable images of lesbians, bisexuals, and gay men in Paris in the 1920s and in New York from the 1930s through 1965.
Born in Springfield, Ohio in 1898, Abbott briefly attended Ohio State University before moving to New York City in 1918. In New York, she lived in a semi-communal Greenwich Village apartment shared by Djuna Barnes and others. Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp were part of her social circle.
In 1921, Abbott moved to Europe where she studied sculpture in Paris and Berlin. Among her lovers in Paris were artists' model Tylia Perlmutter and sculptress