Louise Amans

For a long time the Swiss painter Louise Amans was little more than a name. She was born in 1860 and trained in Paris at the Académie Julian, one of the few art schools that took women seriously in the 1880s. There she met the Belgian painter Augusta Roszmann, and in 1895 the two women set up house together in Basel.

Amans worked in the realist manner of her Paris training, painting portraits and figures, among them a study of a North African man that surfaced at auction more than a century later. She died in 1897, only 37, which left her body of work small. The Kunstmuseum Basel has since gathered her into its cabinet of women artists, the Frauenkabinett, beside better-remembered contemporaries like Ottilie Roederstein.