Ode to Betsy Repelius | To the Joffers of Amsterdam

The youngest of eight children, you came into the world in Amsterdam in the mid-19th century. Against your father's wishes, you decided to become a professional artist. You studied at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam, from 1873 to 1876. Only two years earlier, Amsterdam's art academy opened its doors to women. And so you were one of the first women ever allowed to study at an art academy in the Netherlands as a full-time student! Early on you won awards and exhibited at home and abroad, including Germany, Russia and France. With your good friend Thérèse Schwartze, you made two study trips to Paris - mega cool, since at the time it was rather controversial for two women to travel unaccompanied, especially abroad. Through Thérèse Schwartze, you entered a network of even more female artists, including the painter Lizzy Ansingh - her niece - who painted a portrait of you.

The famous Amsterdam architect Joseph Cuypers had you design a house on Vondelstraat. With a large studio in the attic, where you could devote yourself to your art in peace and quiet. You painted the ceilings yourself. In this house you surrounded yourself with all independent career women, including music teacher Elvira Collin and ophthalmologist Marie du Saar, who became your roommates for a while. Marie du Saar was even the very first woman to receive a doctorate from the University of Amsterdam! You organized dinners and evenings of music, games and theater that attracted many different artisans, musicians, bohemians and art collectors. And feminists, moreover, to which you yourself belonged. For example, you were a member of the Amsterdam chapter of the Association for Women's Suffrage. You were enormously generous in your legacy to the Amsterdam art world. For example, you left your entire studio with painting supplies to the painter and your close friend Marie Heineken, a niece of the famous beer brewer.

As a woman, devoting yourself completely to artistry was certainly not the norm at the time. And certainly not for women from wealthy families who, after drawing and painting lessons in their youth, were expected to stay at home to become subservient housewives and mothers. But consciously you never married a man. Indeed, that would restrict your freedom far too much, since until 1957 married women became incapacitated upon marriage a could have no property of their own, no bank account and no legal signature. There are suspicions that, in addition, you may not have been attracted to men at all, although, of course, unfortunately we can no longer ask you that. For example, you wrote to your good friend, the ophthalmologist Marie du Saar, after she married a man that you did not believe that a man could love her more than you did.

Separately, you show par excellence how a woman at the end of the 19th century could break free from conventions and expectations against all odds. You broke with limiting stereotypes and did not care about prejudices surrounding women in independent, gainful employment. For example, you wrote to your good friend: “A scientific woman like you and someone who devotes herself to art cannot become old and boring, we do not close our house to men nor to women, so there is no question of old spinsters.”

Maaike Rikhof, Curator of Modern Art at the Frans Hals Museum