Like when the Paris School turned me down because I was a girl. I wasn’t foolish enough to try to argue with them that my work was better than any. Instead, I accepted their rejection and I resolved to work harder still. Locked in my room, all I did was paint, night and day. I did not leave the house, save for twice each week, when I would pack up my easel and my paints and I would walk to Hospital Boulevard where the horse markets take place. Here, amongst the chaos, I would set up my equipment and I would focus my eye on the horses. The most amazing creatures went under the hammer at these auction yards. Men would enter leading cavalcades of mares, all rich bays or burnished chestnuts. There were pleasure horses for ladies to ride and work horses for pulling carts. Thick-set grey dappled Percherons and burly Ardennais were very popular and the men who brought them through to the yards for sale would plait their manes with stiff red ribbons and meticulously braid and bind their tails. Their coats shone from being strapped with hay wisps and their hooves were oiled and polished. I know this because I captured every detail on my canvases. I would stay there silent in the corner and paint and paint as the auction was underway until the last lot had been sold and the emptied-out yards stank of dung and cigarettes and sweat.

For three months I worked in this way until I had two paintings that I considered worthy of being submitted to the school. My third and best painting was a work created in the Jardin de Luxembourg, not far from our own stables. It was a portrait of Celine. In this work, I’d painted her side-on, standing in the sunshine dappled by trees. She was staring into the distance, ears pricked and eyes kind. I wasn’t entirely satisfied with the work. There was something unnatural about her legs – perhaps the angle of her hocks – legs are fiendishly tricky to do. But all the same, I knew it was a good picture. Her proportions were perfect and the colours and contours were lifelike and shiny. All three paintings were far better than any of those works by the boys who had applied to art school that year. But, don’t say that out loud, Rose! Girls are not allowed to be boastful, remember?