Anne und Jehanne

Laura Leroux-Revault was 22 when she showed this at the Paris Salon of 1894. She was the daughter of the painter Hector Leroux and had trained at the Academie Julian, one of the few Paris studios that took women seriously, under Jules Lefebvre and in the studio of Jean-Jacques Henner, both friends of her father. You can see both teachers here, the medieval troubadour costume from Lefebvre and the soft, glowing skin from Henner. She loved Shakespeare and the Middle Ages, and returned often to women dressed for an earlier century. This is an early work, made before she married and took the double name by which the museum in Nancy now lists her. It is one of the few of her pictures that a public collection has kept.