Léon Cogniet in his studio

Around 1830, Léon Cogniet opened his Parisian studio at 9, rue Grange-aux-Belles to students, while he entrusted Marie-Amélie, his sister and student, with the running of a studio for girls. The importance of teaching was such that in 1860 the Conversation dictionary associates the notion of "atelier" with the one in which he welcomed nearly a thousand students in the space of thirty years, and whose life would continue for another ten years or so. While the men's workshop prepared many of them for the Prix de Rome, the girls' workshop often served as a worldly education, teaching young ladies the rudiments of the amateur arts.

These views of the studio, taken by one of Cogniet's main pupils, Caroline Thévenin, show both the life of the place and the learning methods, based on copying the master's works. Diane chasseresse (circa 1819) is being copied by a young woman, alongside drawing boards and plaster casts that replaced posing sessions with live models, which propriety restricted to women. On the other hand, such representations reveal the ambition of the artist, for whom painting corresponds to a professional orientation. Caroline, like her younger sister Rosalie and Marie-Amélie Cogniet, led the lives of unmarried artists, a prerequisite for practicing their craft in a world still rigidly bound by social convention.

Her case is not an isolated one. Among the students of this important workshop, renowned throughout Europe, was Rosa Bonheur. The teacher's open-mindedness allowed the emergence of different aesthetic orientations that evolved with the century. In 1865, at the age of 52, Caroline Thévenin married her 71-year-old master, with a view to passing on the legacy of a workshop that was on the verge of dying out, and of which she has left the most vivid testimony with these two views, the first of which was exhibited at the Salon of 1836.