Trompe l'oeil painting.(Current and coming)

Trompe l'oeil painting reached the height of its popularity in this country around the turn of the twentieth century. Because these works often feature dead game, hunting tools, and smoking paraphernalia, they are frequently considered works painted by male artists for male patrons, which many were. Indeed, at the time they were painted, they were sometimes called "bachelor subjects." An exception to this male bastion is Claude (born Claudine) Raguet Hirst, a trompe l'oeil painter of great ability who stands out not only because she was the female artist of note working in this genre, but also because she painted many of these illusions in watercolor, when her male colleagues all worked in oil.

Hirst left a scanty paper trail, but by piecing together reviews, a couple of letters, and exhibition records, Martha M. Evans has been able to construct a retrospective exhibition of her engaging paintings, thirty-eight of which are on view at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., through December 19. The show entitled Claude Raguet Hirst: Transforming the American Still Life will subsequently travel to the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio, where it may be seen from January 15 through April 10, 2005.

Hirst was born into a family of comfortable, but sometimes fluctuating means in Cincinnati, a city in which the arts flourished during the post-Civil War era. During the mid-nineteenth century it was a center for the aesthetic movement, specifically for art pottery and woodworking. These pursuits were largely the domain of women, who were entering the workforce in increasing numbers. Hirst was trained at the McMicken School of Drawing and Design (later named the Cincinnati School of Design), in which she enrolled in 1874 and where she followed a traditional course of study similar to that offered by art academies in larger cities, except that her curriculum included wood carving.

In 1879 Hirst moved to New York City, which was a bold move for a single young woman at the time. There she studied with the artists Agnes Dean Abbatt, Charles Courtney Curran, ...