Augusta Roszmann

Augusta Roszmann was born in Ghent in 1859 and went to Paris to become a painter at a time when the official art schools still shut their doors to women. Like many of her generation she enrolled instead at the Académie Julian, the private studio that took female students, and worked under academic masters such as William-Adolphe Bouguereau and Jules Lefebvre.

She built a reputation as a portrait painter and collected the honours that mattered then, an honourable mention at the Paris Salon in 1889, a place at the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago, and a bronze medal at the Paris Exposition of 1900. One of her surviving works is a self-portrait from 1885 showing her standing at her easel, brushes in hand.

She lived to 1945 and died in the city where she had started, Ghent, at the age of 85.