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Portrait of Yale’s First Seven Women PhDs

Portrait of Yale’s First Seven Women PhDs, 2016. Oil on linen on panel, 72 x 59 in.

This painting honoring the first seven women to receive PhDs from Yale, in 1894, was commissioned by the Yale Women’s Faculty Forum and is permanently installed in Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library.

Read the project proposal.

ARTICLES

Admission Accomplished, by Anne Ewbank

Shortly after, in 1892, Yale’s Department of Philosophy and the Arts was reorganized into the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in 1892, and it came with another change: women could now be admitted. Two years later, seven women were awarded PhDs, in subjects from Romance Languages to Chemistry. Their accomplishment was commemorated last year, when a portrait of the seven, painted by Brenda Zlamany and pictured above, was hung in Sterling Library.

Portrait of Yale’s first seven women Ph.D.s unveiled, By Román Castellanos-Monfil

One of the challenges she faced, Zlamany said, was trying to depict women who have long been dead and of whom very few photographs exist — in fact, no photographs are known to exist of Sara Bukley Rogers. Unable to work from photographs of the seven women, Zlamany had her daughter pose in the costumes and also found real-life women to act as surrogates in order to replicate skin tones.

First female Ph.D.s memorialized, by Sarah Stein

“When I view portraits like this, of path-breaking women, it’s inspiring to me personally,” (Yale President Peter) Salovey told the News. “These women must have felt that they could do anything, and it makes me think that we can do anything.”

A Portrait A Day — And Back In The Day: A Studio Visit with Brenda Zlamany, by Mary Jones

“It was such an injustice they weren’t painted in their lifetime that I do feel there’s a pull from these women, such a desire to be painted.”