Martha Stettler: a modern female artist from another time

As a woman working as an artist in the late 19th century, it was never going to be easy for Martha Stettler. Despite her talent and support from her family, the Swiss artist struggled to find a place in the art history books. Now, her work is being celebrated in a retrospective where it all began: the Bern Museum of Fine Arts. Martha Stettler was born into a bourgeois family in Bern, on September 25, 1870. Her father, Eugen Stettler - the architect of the Bern museum - recognised and supported his daughter’s artistic talent.  Having sketched the complete collection of plaster sculptures in the museum her father had helped to build, her devotion to drawing paved the way to an education at Bern’s College of Art in 1886 and later on, to Paris aged 23 in 1893. She made Paris her home and it was here that she came to be mentored by the French painter Lucien Simon, who introduced Martha to impressionist painting. Together with her partner Alice Dannenberg, she founded the ‘Académie ...