6 Nov. 1825 – 3 August 1898; French architect, perhaps best known as the architect of the Palais Garnier and the Opéra de Monte-Carlo. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Garnier_(architect)) In 1890, the issue of women's entry to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts was officially taken up when the leaders of the Union des Femmes Peintres et Sculpteurs, who had raised the question the previous year at the Universal Exposition, met with a committee from the Ecole to introduce a petition in support women's admission. The committee's discussion of the issues raised by this possibility would become notorious. In her memoirs, Virginie Elodie Demont-Breton vividly described the scene when she and Héléna Hébert (Mme. Léon Bertaux) presented their case: Charles Garnier cried vehemently that it was impossible, that to put young men and women under the same roof was to mix powder and flint and would produce an explosion in which art would be entirely dashed to pieces. [Eugène] Guillaume, usually so composed, cried: "What are you, a street kid? When an artist works, does he dream of anything except the study that excites and worries him? In such a school, where legitimate progress is made, there would no longer be men and women, only artists animated by pure and noble ambition!" Garnier replied, "Maybe you, the great sculptor, are made of marble or wood like your work, but as for me, if at twenty I had seen a sweet young face next to my easel, my drawing would have gone to the devil! Oh, Guillaume you are not a man!" To which Guillaume replied, "Oh, Garnier, you are not an artist!" [Susan Waller, ed., Women Artists in the Modern Era: A Documentary History (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1991), 226–28.] undefined

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