Woman in Art is a fruitful subject. It is both psychological and æsthetic, involving as it does a question of paramount interest. At the same time it includes a special up-to-date character, by virtue of the grave questions arising from the position of woman in our social system of to-day. It is, indeed, the position of woman which has for so long a period set limits to her production of creations of the mind, and her position has had a distinct bearing on her inspiration. Thus it will be grasped, in these times of ours when the movement for the total emancipation of woman has commenced, and when the first franchises granted to her have already borne conclusive results, how it is that our honoured colleague, the editor of this book, has been led, both as an artist and as a writer on art, to conduct a sort of historical examination enabling one to understand the position woman has won in the realms of art in the past, and permitting one to foresee the place she is called upon to occupy in the future. With regard to the productions of the mind, it becomes necessary to establish a well-defined distinction, at least in so far as the past, anterior to the 19th century, is concerned, between the position of women artists and that of literary women. The literary woman, like the man of letters, was not subjected to any special obligation beyond the official sanction granting her the privilege of publication--a sanction which bore only on the question of morals and religion. Every woman was free to write without let or hindrance, without any preliminary education, and even without going through the formalities of publication or the necessities of printing, since a famous woman like Madame de Sévigné owed her celebrity to letters which were not destined to be made public. This explains the number of charming writers among women who have added lustre to French literature by their novels, stories, or simply by their letters, and enables one to realise how these women authors are, in contradistinction to women artists, persons of high standing. The chronicles of the Hôtel de Rambouillet constitute an interesting little chapter in the history of letters in France, just as the "Précieuses Ridicules" or the "Femmes Savantes" of Molière reveal to us the defects and eccentricities into which the literary pretensions of the feminine world had fallen in the 17th century. It cannot, however, be denied that the fair sex freely infused into the literature of that period spontaneity, life and spirit, piquancy, affectation, and the delicate sentiments inherent to its nature, and that it had its share of influence on French taste at that time.