French artist Marie-Élisabeth Cavé (ca. 1809–83) was a successful watercolorist whose works were frequently exhibited at the Parisian Salons and whose art manual Le dessin sans maitre: Méthode pour apprendre à dessiner de mémoire (1850; Drawing without a Master: The Cavé Method for Learning to Draw from Memory, 1868) achieved wide acclaim with multiple editions in the nineteenth century. Yet Cavé has not received much scholarly attention today. This article recovers the history of Cavé and repositions her as an agent of her own success. The simplicity and autonomy of her novel technique, which used repetition to cultivate visual memory, permitted students of all backgrounds to learn to draw. According to artist Eugène Delacroix, Cavé’s method was the only one that could meet the demands of a growing industrial nation. Remarkably, within these treatises, Cavé marshaled the medium of the art manual to inscribe her own ideas about women’s education and work, and to encourage women in nineteenth-century France to become professional artists.

This article is an in-depth probe into A. Güntherová-Mayerová’s pedagogical activities at the Come-nius University in Bratislava, which affected an entire generation of  our art historians. It based on the summarizing and verifying of  known, but especially new information acquired through the study of various archive sources. It strives to provide answers to questions arising from our existing knowledge about the aforementioned issues starting with the clarification of the true extent of her work since the second half  of  the 1930s until 1961. The character and extent of  her teaching is presented aga-inst the historical background of  our university instruction of  art history. Emphasis is placed on the crucial period of  her university work in the socialist era of  the Czechoslovak Republic in the1950s with the significant professionalization of education in the discipline, which we have partly inherited today, accompanied by its strong political deformation. Unfortunately, her forced dismissal from the university in 1961 meant the loss of  the universal expert with vision, ability and a team capable of building a strong art-historical scientific-educational institute.