Angèle Delasalle

She signed her pictures A. Delasalle, and her first reviewers took the painter for a man. A contemporary account has her admitted to an international painters' association as its first and only woman member.

She was born in Paris in 1867 and worked through the 1880s at the Académie Julian, the private school where women could paint from the model while the École des Beaux-Arts still refused to enrol them. Her teachers there were Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant, Jean-Paul Laurens and Jules Lefebvre, established Salon painters. She showed at the Salon from 1888, won a medal in 1897 for a return from the hunt, and in 1899 a state travel grant sent her to Italy, the Netherlands and England. What she brought back from that journey was Rembrandt and Turner, and in England she painted Greenwich Park and the river. The canvas in Athens is a Thames dated 1900.

That same year she took a silver medal at the Paris world's fair, and in 1903 she was among the founders of the Salon d'Automne. She began showing etchings around 1904 and was made a Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur in 1926. Then she went out of view so completely that catalogues still disagree on whether she died in 1939 or 1941.