‘La femme du monde est difficilement la femme de son mari’: the artistic collaboration of Dora Hitz and Carmen Sylva

The artistic collaboration of Carmen Sylva and the Bavarian painter Dora Hitz is not widely known. Yet it offers a fascinating instance of the European artistic circulations which underpinned late nineteenth-century art and which are now being used to challenge the selective and national constructs of art history’s traditional canons. At the same time, it allows reflection on the challenges facing professional women artists in the period, obstacles that have impacted their place in history ever since. Bringing to light Hitz’s œuvre in Romania, this article focuses in particular on the series of paintings she executed after Carmen Sylva’s writings for the Queen’s music room in Castle Peleş in the 1880s. It argues that the paintings not only show a transnational awareness of European developments, but also map Sylva’s at times idiosyncratic, albeit constant, preoccupation with the role of women in the arts.